And by pants, I mean passwords.

It looks like reports have been flying all morning that Steam’s forums have been hacked. Steam is an online community and gaming service that provides digital downloads of popular games from the currently popular Batman: Arkham Asylum to extremely rave MMOFPS Team Fortress 2. Aside from the service, Steam also delivers an extremely broad community of online forums.

Kotaku, the Inquistr, and others already have the report.

Sometime last night Valve took down their official Steam forums for “maintenance;” however, users who happened to be browsing the site at the time report that it happened because the forums had been pwned by hackers.

In the minutes before the forums went down abruptly for the unscheduled maintenance, users reported that a new category had appeared directing users to a site called “Fkn0wned.” In addition, numerous users have reported that their e-mail addresses attached to the Steam forums have received spam ostensively from the site listed.

Kotaku has reported that Fkn0wned.com is denying responsibility, “Fkn0wned Forum is currently unavailable In lights of someone crediting us for the recent breaches of steam forums, the board is offline. Fkn0wned is not responsible.”

Fortunately the Steam service and official forum password databases are separate—however, as users who sign onto the forums may use exactly the same accounts on both, it means that they’re not vulnerable to attack. As usual, it’s important to use different passwords for different services; and, perhaps most importantly, never reuse the password for your primary e-mail account on any services you use. That way at least you don’t lose everything in the end.

The last time we saw forums hacked or taken offline happened be during the heady days of LulzSec, when the Internet highwaymen broke into Betheda Softworks’s forums and upended the account credentials there onto the Web.

If you use the same handle on the Steam service and the official forums: change your passwords on the double, soldier!