HBO Hack – Game of Thrones Season 7 Episode 4 Leaked
The Queen did it……
The cable network HBO capped off several weeks of controversy and misfortune with further bad news on Friday, they’d been hacked…again. It then emerged that episode 4 of Game of Thrones had leaked on the internet.
Confederate to blame?
The mishap came amid continuing rows over HBO’s announcement that it is planning a drama series titled Confederate. Set in the deep south it imagines what America would have been like if the outcome of the civil war had been different and slavery had remained legal.
The announcement marked a sharp contrast with Amazon’s revelation that it was also planning a post-civil war fiction series. Their series imagines what might have happened if freed slaves had been given control of three southern states as reparations, and turned the territory into a sovereign country, called New Colonia.
The leak of the Game of Thrones episode, the fourth in the current seventh season of the smash-hit show, through the channel’s Indian distribution partner, Star India.
“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 spokesperson said.
Not long after episode three in the latest season of Game of Thrones aired, reports sprung up that HBO had been the target of a major hacking incident, in which the following week’s script and advance episodes of other shows, including Ballers and Room 104, had been stolen.
Journos get message from Hackers
Some journalists received emails last Sunday night announcing “the greatest leak of cyber space era is happening” and urging the media to spread the word.
The message ended: “Whoever spreads well, we will have an interview with him. HBO is falling.”
HBO condemned the breach as disruptive, unsettling and disturbing and said the authorities were investigating.
Game of Thrones has been hit by leaks and pirating in prior seasons, with unauthorized files being downloaded and shared millions of times.
HBO had stopped sending out advance review screeners in the build-up to the latest season of Game of Thrones, in an effort to protect its content.
The kerfuffle comes on the heels of a campaign on social media to sink the Confederate project before it films.
