Earlier this week, it was reported that HBO had been hacked, resulting in the theft of several TV episodes and written material connected to Game of Thrones. It has now been reported that this Sunday’s episode of the hit fantasy show has also been leaked, but from a different source.
As reported by The Verge, Episode 4 of the current season of Game of Thrones is now online. It has been confirmed that the source of this leak is Star India, one of HBO’s distribution partners, and that the company’s logo appears as a watermark throughout the episode.
In a statement, a spokesman for Star India said, “[We can confirm] the compromise of episode 4 of Game of Thrones Season 7, earlier this afternoon. We take this breach very seriously and have immediately initiated forensic investigations at our and the technology partner’s end to swiftly determine the cause. This is a grave issue and we are taking appropriate legal remedial action.”
As The Verge notes, the leak earlier this week hasn’t yet resulted in any Game of Thrones episodes appearing online, only scripts for the show. Hackers obtained 1.5 terabytes of data from HBO, which also included upcoming episodes of the sports comedy Ballers and the new anthology drama Room 104.
The HBO breach was the latest in a series of hacking threats against high-profile entertainment companies. In May, it was reported that Disney’s big-budget sequel Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales had been stolen and was being held for ransom by hackers. However, the studio subsequently denied that the film was taken, and stated that it was a merely a “threat.”
This followed an incident earlier this year, when a hacker claimed that he had stolen the latest season of the Netflix show Orange is the New Black, and was similarly demanding a payout from the streaming giant. The biggest studio hack to date was the infamous attack on Sony’s servers in 2014, when over 100 terabytes of data was uploaded online.