LOS ANGELES (BNO NEWS) -- The season premiere of the popular television drama series 'Dexter' leaked online on early Friday morning, more than a week before it is due to air in the United States.

The sixth season of Dexter is set to start airing on October 2 on premium cable television service Showtime. It had around two million viewers per episode last season but, due to Showtime's limited availability, Dexter is one of the most downloaded shows online.

On early Friday morning, messages appeared on several websites containing download links to the season premiere. It is a 502 MB file ripped from a DVD source, most likely a promotional DVD sent to members of the media for review purposes.

Soon after the web release, copies of the file were uploaded to BitTorrent, which is a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol used to distribute large amounts of data over the internet. According to the website TorrentFreak, Dexter is one of the most downloaded shows on BitTorrent.

It was not immediately known who leaked the copy, but it comes just days after the season premiere of 'House' also appeared online. That copy was tagged as 'Media Screener', suggesting it also originated from a promotional DVD sent to the media.

In 2009, Dexter was the fourth most downloaded show on BitTorrent with an estimated 2,780,000 downloads for the top episode. A year later Dexter climbed to third place with an estimated 3,880,000 downloads for the most popular episode, according to TorrentFreak.

Dexter, which debuted in October 2006, centers on a bloodstain pattern analyst for the Miami Metro Police Department who moonlights as a serial killer. It stars Michael C. Hall as Dexter Morgan, Jennifer Carpenter as Debra Morgan, and Desmond Harrington as Joey Quinn.