The latest episode of HBO's highly popular fantasy television series, "Game of Thrones," has just Leaked online ahead of its intended release. Fans of the television series adaptation of George R.R. Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" novels had expected the episode to show up eventually given the recent HBO server hack. However, new reports have now confirmed that the leak is apparently not connected with the recent breach.
Containment problem
According to a report from The Verge, the leak itself apparently originated from one of HBO's distribution partners in India.
This is also evident in the company's logo appearing as a watermark throughout the leaked episode. The distributor, Star India, also admitted publicly that there was, in fact, an internal leak and that they are already launching a forensic investigation to track down the person responsible for leaking the unaired episode. The company also revealed that they are taking immediate legal remedial action to protect themselves. Finding the root cause of the leak should also allow them to prevent it from happening again in the future.
Intentional leak
"Game of Thrones" season 7 episode 4 was originally spotted as a Mp4 file on Star India's own website. Someone within the company may have intentionally uploaded the episode onto the company's servers in an attempt to smuggle it out.
However, users were soon able to spot it, which led to it being downloaded and shared on Reddit via Google Drive links.
Not connected
Earlier in the week, reports started to emerge online that revealed a successful hack on HBO's servers. The perpetrators were reportedly able to download 1.5 terabytes of data from the company's servers, which potentially included all of the unaired episodes of the show's seventh season.
However, given that there haven't been any other episodes that were leaked, the hackers likely hadn't managed to pilfer full episodes of the show. So far, the only data that has been published online has been scripts for the upcoming episodes.
The episode, titled "The Spoils of War," is set to be released today, Aug. 6, which means that the damage may not be that serious as it only translates to a handful of people seeing the episode earlier than intended.
This is of course not the first time that HBO has encountered leaked episode issues. The first four episodes of the show's fifth season were also previously leaked online. This was then followed by a leak of a season 6 episode last year.
