It’s been a pretty rough week for HBO thus far.
After hackers got their hands on over a terabyte of confidential information, including Game of Thrones scripts, another major leak has just surfaced.
Starting a few hours ago, a copy of the upcoming Game of Thrones episode “The Spoils of War” began to circulate on various file-sharing and streaming sites, including The Pirate Bay.
While most copies are pulled offline quickly, presumably by HBO itself, the unreleased fourth episode of season 7 is still widely available.
Although the leak comes only a few days after the prominent HBO hack, the two might not be related. The leaked episode appears to be an internal release and is tagged with “For Internal Viewing Only” as well as a prominent “Star India Pvt Ltd” watermark.
Star India is a large media company owned by 21st Century Fox, which broadcasts the popular HBO series locally.
[/expand]Despite being a low-quality leak, plenty of eager Game of Thrones fans are likely to jump on the episode early. Whether the pirated copy is intact, or whether it’s unfinished is unclear. The official release will still take a few more days.
This is not the first time that Game of Thrones episodes have leaked early. Two years ago the same happened with the first four episodes of season 5. Still, leaks or not, that season still broke previous viewership records.
Update: As expected, HBO confirmed that the leak is not related to the earlier hack.
