Back in July this year, Instagram announced its plans for working on an improved two-factor authentication (2FA) system. Herein users can use a third party app for verification, instead of one time passwords sent on mobile, which are believed to still be vulnerable.While the platform still had the plans in the pipeline, earlier this month, Instagram accounts of thousands of users were compromised. Without notice or explanation, users were being locked out of their accounts, even affecting some accounts with 2FA enabled. This raised numerous questions about the platform's authentication system. Now, responding to the chaos, Instagram has finally announced a number of changes to make the platform more secure for its one billion users. Among those changes is the ‘About This Account ‘ feature to control the spread of fake news.

Instagram’s more than 1 billion users will now be able to evaluate the authenticity of their accounts, weeks after parent Facebook rolled out similar measures in a bid to weed out fake accounts on its social media platform.
Instagram said that it will launch the “About This Account” feature that will allow users to see the advertisements an account is running, the country where the account is located, username changes in the past year as well as other details.
Instagram co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Mike Krieger said.“Keeping people with bad intentions off our platform is incredibly important ... that means trying to make sure the people you follow and the accounts you interact with are who they say they are, and stopping bad actors before they cause harm,”
Instagram also said it will allow the use of third-party apps such as DUO Mobile and Google Authenticator for two-factor authentication to help users securely log in to their accounts.Two-factor authentication adds an extra layer of security on top of usernames and passwords by prompting users for information they have access to.

Earlier this month, Facebook introduced this feature for users who managed pages with a large U.S. following, seeking to make it harder to administer a page using a fake or compromised account.These features will be broadly available in the coming weeks, the photo-sharing app said in a blog post.