Multi-account switching on the mobile version of Instagram is now possible on the iOS.

Instagram officially announced the update via a blog post on Monday. It might not come as big news to some, but it’s definitely something that frequent users of the photo-sharing app have been waiting for.

The feature isn’t exactly new, though. The beta update version 7.12.0 that brought it to the table rolled out back in November 2015, but it was only available to Android users. This time around, everyone can use it.

“Starting this week, you can quickly and easily switch between multiple accounts on Instagram!” the company says, addressing all users on every mobile platform and noting that the feature is part of version 7.15.

via Instagram Officially Turns On Multi-Account Switching For Mobile, And This Is Why It’s Important : PERSONAL TECH : Tech Times.

The warnings Brooks and millions of other people received that December weren’t fabrications. Within hours of anonymous hackers penetrating Gawker servers and exposing cryptographically protected passwords for 1.3 million of its users, botnets were cracking the passwords and using them to commandeer Twitter accounts and send spam. Over the next few days, the sites advising or requiring their users to change passwords expanded to include Twitter, Amazon, and Yahoo.

“The danger of weak password habits is becoming increasingly well-recognized,” said Brooks, who at the time blogged about the warnings as the Program Associate for the Center for Democracy and Technology. The warnings, he told me, “show [that] these companies understand how a security breach outside their systems can create a vulnerability within their networks.”

The ancient art of password cracking has advanced further in the past five years than it did in the previous several decades combined. At the same time, the dangerous practice of password reuse has surged. The result: security provided by the average password in 2012 has never been weaker.

A new world

The average Web user maintains 25 separate accounts but uses just 6.5 passwords to protect them, according to a landmark study (PDF) from 2007. As the Gawker breach demonstrated, such password reuse, combined with the frequent use of e-mail addresses as user names, means that once hackers have plucked login credentials from one site, they often have the means to compromise dozens of other accounts, too.

Newer hardware and modern techniques have also helped to contribute to the rise in password cracking. Now used increasingly for computing, graphics processors allow password-cracking programs to work thousands of times faster than they did just a decade ago on similarly priced PCs that used traditional CPUs alone. A PC running a single AMD Radeon HD7970 GPU, for instance, can try on average an astounding 8.2 billion password combinations each second, depending on the algorithm used to scramble them. Only a decade ago, such speeds were possible only when using pricey supercomputers.

MORE:  Why passwords have never been weaker—and crackers have never been stronger | Ars Technica.