Game of thrones leak: Star India promises ‘legal remedial action’

An unreleased episode of Game of Thrones’ season 7 -- to be shown on HBO on the night of August 6 — has been leaked online from Star India and the company has said it was investigating the incident.

Mobile comparison website Smartprix on Friday spotted a direct link to the MP4 file of the episode at Star India’s own distribution site, The Verge tech website reported. Later, people started downloading the episode and sharing the clip on social media platforms.

“This confirms the compromise of episode 4 of Game of Thrones Season 7, earlier this afternoon,” a Star India spokesperson said in a statement.

“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,” the spokesperson added.

According to The Verge, the episode has Star India’s logo appearing throughout the video leaked on the internet.

Earlier, in a separate data breach, a group of hackers who leaked unaired episodes of HBO’s popular shows, including GoT, threatened to release additional content on August 6.

The hacker group wrote in an automated email reply sent to Variety.com, that it will release the leak gradually every week and added that the next release may come this Sunday at 12 GMT (5pm IST).

The group also repeated its claim it had obtained 1.5 TB of data when it broke into HBO’s computer networks.

There were fears among HBO employees of their personal data having been accessed by the hackers, but the company denied the notion.

However, according to Variety.com, a security contractor hired by HBO to scrub search results for the leaked data from Google revealed in a filing on Tuesday that the hackers got their hands on “thousands of internal documents”.