There’s been yet another leak of the latest season of HBO’s hit series Game of Thrones. This time, Game of Thrones Season 7 Episode 6 has leaked online, but supposedly, this isn’t related to the recent data breach at HBO. Instead, it appears that this is a recording of an accidental early airing of the episode.
Game of Thrones Season 7 Episode 6
HBO had slated Game of Thrones Season 7 Episode 6 for airing this coming Sunday, but some fans of the show are apparently downloading it from file-sharing signs after it was leaked. There’s a whole community of fans devoted to the hit HBO series who use Reddit to talk about their favorite show, and now there’s a Reddit thread about how Game of Thrones Season 7 Episode 6 was leaked.
Redditors spotted the episode after HBO Nordic in Spain apparently posted it accidentally. A spokesperson for HBO told The Verge that Game of Thrones Season 7 Episode 6 was “accidentally posted for a brief time on the HBO Nordic and HBO Espana platforms.” The spokesperson added that it appears a third-party vendor was to blame for the leak, and the episode was removed “as soon as it was recognized.”
The episode was posted online for about an hour before the network removed it, but the damage had been done. Now the leaked episode is up on file-sharing sites, and fans are downloading and watching it early. All it took was a single hour for that episode to become widely available on file-sharing sites.
Not related to earlier HBO data breach
The HBO spokesperson also clarified to The Verge that this leak of Game of Thrones Season 7 Episode 6 is not related to the “recent cyber incident at HBO in the U.S.” You may recall that HBO sustained a data breach last month, and hackers managed to steal about 1.5 terabytes of data from its servers in the U.S.
They took internal company documents and full episodes of the HBO shows Room 104 and Ballers, in addition to large amounts of other copyrighted content, such as a script for a Game of Thrones episode, episode outlines for the show, videos, and images. The hackers also took and leaked the personal information of an HBO executive.
The hackers demanded $250,000 in Bitcoin to keep the rest of the company’s sensitive information from being leaked, and HBO supposedly requested more time to get the cryptocurrency together.
HBO needs to get it together
HBO has been having trouble keeping the newest episodes of its mega-popular series under wraps for years. Two years ago, advance screeners caused Season 5’s first four episodes to be leaked early online. Then last year, a subsidiary of HBO released one episode of Season 6 one day early. Apparently, HBO stopped using screeners for Season 7 because of all the leaks, but despite that, there have already been two leaks of full episodes, and we’re only on the sixth episode.
In addition to Episode 6 being leaked this week, Episode 4 of Season 7 was also leaked this year, although HBO said the leak came from Star India rather than its own network.
