“Starting January 15, 2024, we’re removing or consolidating some detailed targeting options that relate to topics people may perceive as sensitive. Existing ad sets with impacted targeting options will continue to run until March 18 2024, but will require you to update your targeting selections. After this date, we will stop delivering ads to the discontinued detailed targeting options, and impacted ad sets may be paused”, explained by Meta.

The tech giant’s decision comes after the company’s multiple run-ins with improper and even illegal use of ad targeting options.

How will advertisers know that their campaign needs accumulation?

Meta explained that once the change goes into effect, affected advertisers will be alerted via a notification in Ads Manager if any of their campaigns need updating. The company also notes that it will provide alternative targeting recommendations when possible.

But it could have an impact on your process, and how you get your Facebook and IG ads in front of the right people.

Although it’s prohibited to target individuals based on race, targeting users in specific regions might be argued to achieve similar outcomes. Consequently, Meta faces a challenge in completely eliminating all forms of questionable audience targeting. Over time, Meta has enhanced its automated ad targeting tools, reaching a point where providing advertisers with more manual options can be counterproductive.

Meta encourages marketers to leverage its broad targeting and Advantage+ options, placing greater trust in Meta’s systems. This approach often leads to improved performance by exposing ads to users who may not have been manually targeted.

As Meta progressively eliminates various targeting categories, opting for its systematic display options might prove to be a more advantageous strategy. Eventually, it appears that relying on these systematic options could become the primary choice for brands. Regardless, it’s important to take note of this recent alteration for your Facebook and Instagram ads.

“Immuta Discover is the foundational component to making any data security program work within your organization and to remain compliant. It’s the first step that must happen in order to protect your data. Data is constantly changing in today’s digital age. Organizations must fully understand what data they have – with accurate classification – and maintain a trustworthy inventory of sensitive data across cloud platforms in order to meet growing data security and access demands. And Immuta Discover helps our customers accomplish just this”, said Mo Plassnig, chief product officer at Immuta.

Immuta Discover leverages cutting-edge technology to identify structured data within cloud platforms, harnessing metadata from renowned enterprise data catalogs, including the likes of Alation, a distinguished data intelligence catalog. This advancement promises to elevate the efficiency and accuracy of data management within the cloud, empowering organizations to navigate the complex data landscape with ease.

Immuta Discover revolutionizes data management by automating manual processes, strengthening data security and providing unprecedented data visibility. This transformative solution empowers organizations to uncover the true value of their data by delivering important insights and improving data protection.

The key to effective data security, as Immuta highlights, lies in accurate data discovery, tagging and classification, coupled with comprehensive metadata. In a recent post, Immuta highlighted common pitfalls of existing solutions, pointing to accuracy and granularity issues that can lead to security vulnerabilities and compliance issues.

Immuta Discover aims to strengthen data protection and encourage informed decision making, offering a brighter and more secure future for data-driven organizations.

Noname Security collects and processes findings from Wiz and displays them on the Noname platform to provide customers with the most comprehensive view of an organization’s APIs. Together, Noname Security and Wiz enable complete visibility, context, and control of infrastructure hosting mission-critical and highly sensitive APIs to minimize and remediate risk.

“Wiz is a clear leader in cloud security and is the fastest-growing software company ever due to the company’s success in protecting and servicing hundreds of the world’s leading organizations. We’re proud to partner with their team to provide customers with visibility and intelligence across their API ecosystem to find, build, and maintain secure APIs throughout the entire lifecycle.”

said Aner Morag, Vice President of Technology of Noname Security.

With this partnership, customers of Wiz and Noname Security will be able to:

Proactively Improve Security Posture:

– See the full picture – Easily discover mission-critical infrastructure and APIs.
– Increase situational awareness – Gain complete visibility into API and infrastructure interactions.
– Identify toxic combinations of real risk and attack paths – Customers using Wiz and Noname gain more context about their APIs and the infrastructure components they interact with.
– Turn insights into action – Custom workflows from Noname let you take infrastructure insights from Wiz and fix issues before they’re exploited.

Find and Fix Breaches Faster:

– Rapid integration – Easily connect with Wiz to see even more context.
– Prioritize risks – Accurately prioritize risk to stop data exfiltration.
– Deeper investigation – Analyze attacker behavior, identify attack paths, and focus remediation efforts.
– Take action immediately, automatically – Integrations to the rest of your infrastructure for automatic remediation, including updating WAF policies, creating tickets, and flagging issues for additional investigation.

Ensure Compliance:

– Monitor APIs – Stay compliant with industry standards, data privacy laws, and other requirements, including PCI-DSS, GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, and more.
– Identify sensitive data with data classification – Understand which APIs handle sensitive data and which infrastructure components they connect with.
– Data Residency – Keep sensitive data in-country with data residency monitoring
– Policy Enforcement – Create custom policies to ensure continuous compliance with changing rules, regulations, and requirements.

According to the officials, these hackers applied some basic but clearly effective hacking techniques such as spear phishing, brute force attacks, credential harvesting, etc. It seems that their goal was to obtain some “sensitive information” concerning the U.S weapons and missile development, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities, vehicle and aircraft design, and command, control, and communications systems.

The alert said:

“The acquired information provides significant insight into the U.S weapons platforms development and deployment timelines, vehicle specifications, and plans for communications infrastructure and information technology. By acquiring proprietary internal documents and email communications, adversaries may be able to adjust their own military plans and priorities, hasten technological development efforts, inform foreign policymakers of U.S intentions, and target potential sources for recruitment.”

In other words, it seems that hackers have obtained really important information.