Hackers attack gay gamers website
An anonymous homophobe knocked GayGamer.net offline over the weekend after flooding the site with threatening emails and death threats.
The site’s owner Flynn de Marco told fellow gaming site Kotaku.com that small waves of denial of service attacks had started on Wednesday morning, causing occasional timeouts on the site.
GayGamer.net is the internet’s only gay news-gathering games site.
By Friday afternoon the site was able to block the IP addresses where the attacks seemed to be coming from, but that evening someone began flooding the site’s forums and chat room with hate speech, including some death threats, and over-sized images meant to bog down the site.
The flood of messages and images all originated from the same IP in Philadelphia, de Marco said.
The site deleted the offensive messages, but the continued attacks lead to the site’s host taking GayGamer down until the attacks could be permanently blocked.
The official statement on the website over the weekend said:
“Hello, faithful readers: As you might have noticed, we have had some connection issues in the last few days and now the site is completely down.
“I’m sad to say that we have been the target of homophobic hackers. Thankfully, they didn’t get to our database so all of our stuff is still in tact…You can’t keep a good gay gamer down, so we’ll be back before you know it, serving up all the sassy game content you can handle.”
GayGamer.net is now back up and running.
A study released earlier in the year found that online gamers face a homophobic culture.
The “Gaymer Survey,” conducted at the University of Illinois and involving over 10,000 respondents, found that gay gamers experienced a high level of homophobic attitudes and language.
88% of respondents said that they had heard the phrase “that’s so gay.”
84% said that the word ‘gay’ had been used in a derogatory way.
Over half of the respondents felt that gays were stereotyped, 52% found gaming worlds to be hostile to gay and lesbian gamers, while 42% felt that gays were under-represented.
Only a minority of participants (9%) claimed that they had never encountered anti-gay remarks.
