Unaired Game of Thrones episode leaked

WASHINGTON • The unaired fourth episode of the new season of HBO's hit series Game Of Thrones has been leaked online, the premium channel's distribution partner Star India has said.

"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," a Star India spokesman said in a statement on Friday.

Star India is a subsidiary of Twenty-First Century Fox. The leak of the episode, titled The Spoils Of War, was separate from a hack on HBO that was disclosed earlier this week, HBO said in a statement.

In that incident, the company's chairman, Mr Richard Plepler, told employees last Monday in an e-mail that the hackers had stolen "proprietary information", including some programming.

The hackers, who went by the handle little.finger66, claimed to have stolen 1.5 terabytes (TB) of data - though only an estimated 300 megabytes have actually leaked on the Internet - according to a person familiar with the matter who insisted on anonymity.

Entertainment Weekly reported last Monday that the stolen data included two unaired episodes and a script from the Game Of Thrones series, besides several upcoming TV episodes from the series Ballers, Insecure and Room 104. It remains unclear what else may have been compromised and executives at HBO are still scrambling to understand the extent of the damage.

HBO is owned by Time Warner, which is waiting for regulatory approval to sell itself to AT&T Inc in an US$85.4 billion (S$116 billion) deal.

US intelligence officials said the HBO intrusion appears to be much smaller in scale than a similar data breach at Sony in 2014, in which thieves claimed to have made off with roughly 100 TB of data.

That number was never fully confirmed, but the intrusion involved the leaking of a trove of documents and e-mails, many of which were embarrassing in nature. The following year, during the fallout from those revelations, Ms Amy Pascal, the chairman of the Motion Pictures Group of Sony Pictures Entertainment, stepped down.

HBO officials said last Wednesday that they are continuing to look for evidence that the hackers accessed company communications. Mr Plepler wrote in a memo to staff: "At this time, we do not believe that our e-mail system as a whole has been compromised, but the forensic review is ongoing."

Thus far, the data breach appears limited to HBO, according to Time Warner, and none of its other subsidiaries has been affected.

REUTERS, WASHINGTON POST

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A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Sunday Times on August 06, 2017, with the headline Unaired Game of Thrones episode leaked. Subscribe