Instagram Expands 2FA Support Following Recent Wave of Account Hacks

Instagram announced today plans to improve its two-factor authentication (2FA) mechanism by adding support for third-party authenticator apps.

The announcement comes just two weeks after several news outlets reported a wave of Instagram account hacks, some of which had 2FA enabled.

Prior to today, Instagram 2FA only supported SMS-based two-step verification. Starting today, users will be able to use one-time codes generated by third-party "authenticator apps," instead of the code they receive via SMS.

Instagram says that support for third-party authenticator apps has begun to roll out today and will become available for users all over the globe in the coming weeks.

New features to combat influence campaigns

But this wasn't the only feature that the Instagram staff rolled out today. The company is also launching "verified accounts," and a new feature that shows an account's history.

These two features are meant to provide more context to users about the Instagram users they follow.

The second tool is especially useful. Users will be able to see the date an account joined Instagram, the country where the account is located, the accounts with shared followers, any username changes in the last year, and any ads the account is currently running.

The launch of this tool comes weeks after Facebook admitted that Russian and Iranian actors had accounts on Instagram, which they used for political influence campaigns.

Nevertheless, the account history tool will also be useful in the case of account takeovers —when hackers hijack and rename accounts with high follower counts to show ads or resell the profile to the highest bidder.

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