Recently, several blogs have posted articles suggesting that they've been able to get push notifications from AIM intended for other people. These articles go on to imply that there's been an "exploit" of AIM or of Apple's push notification system that allows this behavior to occur.

All of us take our members' privacy very seriously, so although we've not heard from any users affected by this problem, we began investigating the issue at once, and we believe that unless you've purposefully hacked your phone, your IMs and push notifications remain safe.

Read on after the jump if you want the gory details.

All of the reports available to us have to do with jailbroken phones. These are phones which have been hacked so they can run non-Apple approved software or get around other limitations imposed by the iPhone's OS. In the past, jailbroken iPhones have not been usable against Apple's push notification system (for AIM or any other push apps), because the jailbreaking process interfered with the way in which an iPhone registers itself with Apple's push notification servers.

It appears that someone has managed to hack this process and create a way in which jailbroken iPhones could register with these services. It's our suspicion that this process has been applied to more than one phone, but each phone was registered with the same identification. If that were the case, it would mean that when Apple sent out a push notification, it would go to more than one device. We don't know the internals of Apple's systems, of course, so we can't be sure that this is the case, but it does seem to match what we're reading.

We have no reports of this happening to non-jailbroken phones, and I continue to believe that AIM messages and push notifications are perfectly safe. Thanks to you, we send millions of notifications a day to AIM users all over the world, and if even a fraction of a percent of those were being misdirected, we'd hear about them.

We're working with Apple to try to nail down these latest reports, and we're also looking at ways that we might be able to detect these cases and block them. In the meantime, if you're feeling especially paranoid, you can always set your notification preferences to only show the name of the sender and not the message itself. Just launch AIM and go to My Info->Preferences->Push Notifications and choose "Brief" or "Sender Only". That way, the contents of your messages won't be exposed in a push notification message.

Thanks for your continued support of AIM. We're listening to all of your feedback and are working hard to try to get as much of it as we can into future versions.