Unless you’ve been living in a cave beyond the wall for the past couple of weeks, you will have undoubtedly have heard of a little show called Game of Thrones returning to our screens.
Many of us have gone to great lengths to watch the show before pesky friends, colleagues and Twitter followers drop major spoilers all over the show.
However, some people have turned to the sort of measures favoured by a certain dastardly Euron Greyjoy, pirating the new episode as if it was simply a big box of buried treasure.
As reported by Endgadget, analytics company MUSO have revealed how the long awaited season eight premiere was pirated just under 55 million times within the first 24 hours alone.
Approximately 76.6 per cent of these viewers used bootleg streams to pirate the episode, while the other viewers were divided between using downloads (12.2 per cent), public torrents (10.8 per cent) and private torrents (0.5 percent).
MUSO has revealed how around 10 million of those pirated views came from India, where HBO in any format is pretty tricky to access.
Another five million views came from China, where only censored episodes of Game of Thrones are aired.
Such viewers either couldn’t access the show – on account of the cost or lack of services – or simply wished to see the uncensored version for themselves.
However, just under four million views came from the US, where HBO is of course based. This suggess there were many viewers who didn’t want to pay to use either a premium TV service or stream the show legally.
As reported by 9News Sydney, security researchers have warned how illegal pirated downloads giving criminals access to a viewer’s computer.
The most common threat in this instance is said to be Trojan – a damaging type of malware which can give hackers control of the infected computer system.
Seriously guys, piracy isn’t cool and it certainly isn’t the way to ensure Cersei gets the expensive CGI elephants she so desperately craves.
You can now – finally – watch the new season of Game of Thrones on HBO or Sky Atlantic.
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Jules studied English Literature with Creative Writing at Lancaster University before earning her masters in International Relations at Leiden University in The Netherlands (Hoi!). She then trained as a journalist through News Associates in Manchester. Jules has previously worked as a mental health blogger, copywriter and freelancer for various publications.