The consumer electronics heavyweight has advised iPhone users concerned about secure messaging to use the company's iMessage service instead of their carrier's SMS network.

While SMS is a relatively mature technology, in recent years it has attracted the interest of security researchers as an .

Apple made its recommendation in a statement Saturday after a well-known iPhone jailbreaking artist explained in a posting on the Internet how a "flaw" in Apple's implementation of SMS in its mobile operating system, iOS, could be used to .

The flaw is in all versions of iOS, including the latest beta of the next release of the operating system, version 6.0, beta 4, according to the security researcher known as pod2g.

"Apple takes security very seriously," the company said in its statement. "When using iMessage instead of SMS, addresses are verified which protects against these kinds of spoofing attacks."