Earlier today we had reported that the upcoming episode of Game of Thrones season 7, The Spoils of War was leaked and we had doubts regarding the leak originating from HBO as there were reports which said that the episode had Star India’s watermark on the video.

Earlier this week, we found out that HBO was a victim of a cyber attack and the hackers had stolen about 1.5 TB of data and had released some unaired episodes from Ballers and other HBO series and they had also released the written script of the 4th Game of Thrones episode from season 7. Naturally, people were worried that the hackers could release the episode before it aired and that’s what exactly happened.

However, the weird part was that the leak didn’t originate from HBO and the source was very unexpected as it turns out Star India, which is HBO’s distribution partner for Game of Thrones in India was the source for the leak!

Now a Star India spokesperson has confirmed the leak in a statement to The Verge. “This confirms the compromise of episode 4 of Game of Thrones Season 7, earlier this afternoon. 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 episode was uploaded by a reddit user, using Google Drive and soon it found itself being downloaded and being available on torrents and on multiple sites. This is really unfortunate as the news of HBO being hacked and written material being leaked online was a major issue and to make things worse, it’s Indian distribution partner was the source of the leak of the highly anticipated episode just 2 days after the news of the HBO hack was made public.

We hope that HBO takes strict measures to prevent any further leaks this season. The fourth episode, The Spoils of War will air this Sunday on HBO.