GayGamer.net, a website that covers video games and the gaming industry from a gay perspective, was hit by homophobic hackers last weekend and was forced offline for several hours. The US-based website has the tagline: “For boys who like boys who like joysticks.” The site's owner Flynn De Marco said small waves of denial of service attacks started on Wednesday morning, causing occasional timeouts on the website. By Friday, the site was able to block the IPs where the DOS attacks seemed to be coming from. Then on Friday 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 one computer in Philadelphia, he added. According to the FBI, a hate crime is a criminal offense committed against a person, property, or society that is motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender's bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity/national origin. “It's sad to see that even in the virtual worlds of gaming and game coverage people decide that the only way they can express themselves is by attacking others,” reports gaming news website Kotaku. Ref: Kotaku (m)