What Is an Instagram Password Breach and How To Prevent It
Instagram is one of the world’s most-loved social media networks, with roughly one billion monthly active users. Celebrities and businesses find Instagram to be one important internet space to have a presence on.
This photo-sharing app is largely responsible for birthing the age of influencers. Brands market their products to millions of users with the help of influencers, who together create content that is engaging and informative on the platform. Instagram generates its revenue from advertising, which is largely contributed by big businesses that spend millions of dollars on advertising.
There's no question that Instagram has risen to be an indispensable network for both corporate and high-ranking celebrities who depend on it to keep their brands relevant and in the purview of at least a billion people. What no one knew was that Instagram didn't put exhaustive security measures in place to safeguard users’ information.
Instagram’s Breach Saga
Something else that many of us still don't know is web-scraping - a process where bots are used to pull together publicly accessible data from a website. This is how data belonging to 214 million social media accounts was obtained.
Instagram has had a few data breaches in recent years, the latest being in 2021. It was found that hackers accessed information from one of Instagram’s unprotected databases, and the data within wasn’t encrypted. This was due to a misconfigured database that could be accessed by anyone without using a password. It contained over 400 GB of users' data including their Instagram email address, contact number, their location, and biodata.
A 100 GB TXT file named “RockYou21” was found on a popular hacker forum. This file contained 8.4 billion entries of passwords, some of which belonged to millions of Instagram user accounts. The list was made up of accounts belonging to brands, celebrities, influencers, and other high-ranking public figures. There have been at least four known incidents, dating from 2017 when news broke of a data breach that compromised 6 million Instagram user accounts.
The risk of having your confidential information available to just anyone can prove to be very damaging, especially for brands and high-profile people. Although this sounds like some kind of catastrophe, there is hope for users are using Passwarden. Passwarden is a trusted password manager that harnesses state-of-art technologies, bulletproof encryption algorithms, and time-tested security methodologies to ensure that your sensitive data stays behind its locked doors.
You can count on Passwarden to keep your passwords safely managed. Get it now!
Download Passwarden today!
Passwarden is also available as a part of the MonoDefense software bundle.
How to Protect Yourself from a Breach
Passwarden uses Two-Factor authentication, an extra security parameter to the password manager’s service, which sends a one-time passcode to your email address. This passcode is required to be entered before each successful login to any of your online accounts. This protection measure makes it impossible for anyone to gain access to your local apps and other online accounts unless they have your email and password.
In the event where anyone who wants to gain access to your account, Passwarden would have sent you a one-time passcode which would have made you alert about this breach attempt.
How to Generate a Secure Password Using Passwarden
One of the many great features found in Passwarden’s app is a password generator, which helps you create unique and complex, strong passwords for your accounts.
Creating one strong password is already difficult enough, no need to fret; the password generator knows just how to create secure passwords for all your online accounts using a combination of special characters, numbers, and multiple letter casings. This isn’t all; it also instantly saves and stores them in its encrypted storage.
How To Update Your Password in Passwarden
1. Log into your Passwarden account by entering your master password.
2. Then, from the menu, choose your Instagram account.
3. In the right corner of the screen, select the edit button.
4. Type your new password into the field provided.
5. Hit the save button to update it.
Benefits of Passwarden
Multi-platform software
You don't have to choose which of your devices needs to be afforded good security. Passwarden is a multi-platform application that understands that the safety and security of your personal information must be available across your Windows, Mac, Android, or iOS devices just to name a few.
Password sharing
It's not safe to share your passwords with others via chat apps and emails. Passwarden gives its users a safe and secure portal to send passwords, payment data, and personal information.
VPN with a password manager
A Virtual Private Network is something no one can afford to go without. This is that KeepSolid understands well and has made it an added benefit to allow Passwarden to be used together with their VPN service for optimum security.
