How to secure my Instagram account in 2023

How to make sure your Instagram account is secure?

Part 1 - Security checkup

Instagram offers a comprehensive security checkup that prepares you for the worst-case scenario by strengthening your account’s defenses and ensuring your recovery settings are up to date.

To complete the security checkup, follow these steps:

1. In your Instagram app, go to your account’s settings
2. Go to “Security”
3. Click “Security checkup”
4. Go through the recommended steps by Instagram :

Change your password

Make sure you don’t reuse a password from a different website! If you use an easy-to-guess password or reuse passwords that you’ve used on other websites, hackers could get a hold of your password due to old data leaks and simply use them to log in to your account. 

To generate a strong yet easy-to-remember password, you can use a passphrase! Even a short (4 words) passphrase is very strong.
We recommend using a password manager like 1Password instead of remembering your Instagram password.

Update your email address

Ensure your email address is valid and you have access to it. If you don’t have access to the email address, you might be locked out of your account when you try to recover it! Instagram sends login links to the email connected to the account, so verifying this step is essential.

Update your phone number

Make sure the phone number connected to your account is your current phone number. For similar reasons as making sure that your email address is current, if anything happens to your account, Instagram will send you text messages to the phone number connected to your account when you try to recover it. You may get locked out of your account if you no longer have that number!

Turn on Two-factor authentication

Make sure two-factor authentication is turned on and that you have access to your 2FA method. The safest 2FA method is an authentication app like Google Authenticator, but unfortunately, you need to remember to make back-ups, or you might get locked out of your account if you lose access to your phone. For this reason, we recommend using mobile phone text messages as your 2FA method since even if you buy a new phone, you usually have the same number.

Part 2 - Apps and websites

Go through the following steps to make sure no malicious app has access to your account’s data:

1. In your Instagram app, go to your account’s settings
2. Go to “Security”
3. Click “Apps and websites”
4. Go through the list of apps and remove any you don’t recognize (don’t remove Notch, or our real-time monitoring won’t work! Don’t have Notch?)

The apps listed here have received your permission to read your data or make changes to your account. Sometimes, especially if your account is old, there may be apps here that you no longer need or malicious apps that could cause you to get banned. It is good practice to review this list every few months.

Part 3 - Login Activity

To review whether anybody unauthorized has access to your IG account, follow these instructions:

1. In your Instagram app, go to your account’s settings
2. Go to “Security”
3. Click “Login Activity”
4. Review the list of devices and locations, if any of them are not familiar to you, click the “three dots” icon to log them out

Pro Tip - To be extra safe, you can log all devices out (make sure you know your password and have access to your 2FA device first!)

Part 4 - Facebook (if your account is connected)

If your Instagram account is connected to your Facebook account, make sure you follow these crucial steps:

1. Change your Facebook password to something strong that you don’t reuse anywhere else
2. Make sure your phone number and email address are up to date and that you have access to them
3. Verify that you have two-factor authentication turned on in Facebook and that you have access to your two-factor authentication device

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If you follow all of the steps in this article, your account is safer than 99% of accounts out there, and you’ve significantly increased your chances of recovery if anything happens to your account!
Go through our full security checklist, and don’t forget to get insurance for your Instagram account.

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