U.S. prosecutors in New York have been investigating whether Chinese tech company Huawei violated U.S. sanctions in relation to Iran, according to sources familiar with the situation.

Since at least 2016, U.S. authorities have been probing Huawei’s alleged shipping of U.S.-origin products to Iran and other countries in violation of U.S. export and sanctions laws, two of the sources said. News of the Justice Department probe follows a series of U.S. actions aimed at stopping or reducing access by Huawei and Chinese smartphone maker ZTE Corp to the U.S. economy amid allegations the companies could be using their technology to spy on Americans.

In response to more activists using Apple Mac computers instead of Windows PCs, suspected Iranian government hackers have apparently developed their own Mac-based malware, according to a new report from security researchers.

The finding highlights the constant ebb-and-flow of governments disrupting and tracking activist movements. As one group adopts a new tool or technique, state-sponsored hackers may need to adapt to get the information they're after. "This demonstrates that Iranian actors are responsive to their environment," Collin Anderson, one of the security researchers behind the report, told in an email.

The government of Iran is no stranger to using its power to restrict Internet freedoms in its country, blocking millions of websites when they have run counter to religious or political beliefs.

Now it sounds like it plans to take that another step further: engineers are developing a system to identify any individual in the country who goes online. The idea with IDing users seems to be that by doing so, it will deter them from posting or reading contentious material by making it impossible to do so anonymously. It comes alongside wider plans to introduce filtering services to identify and block offensive content. This services would be rolled out in phases. 

After analyzing a lot of Stuxnet files collected over a two-year period, experts could identify the first victims of the Stuxnet worm. After Stuxnet was discovered over four years ago as one of the most sophisticated and dangerous malicious programs, researchers can now provide insight into the question: what were the goals of the Stuxnet operation?

Initially security researchers had no doubt that the whole attack had a targeted nature. The code of the worm looked professional and exclusive; there was evidence that extremely expensive zero-day vulnerabilities were used. However, it wasn’t yet known what kind of organizations were attacked first and how the malware ultimately made it right. 

An Iranian court ordered the photo-sharing app Instagram be blocked in the Islamic Republic.

The agency said a court order, stemming from a private lawsuit, had been given to Iran's Ministry of Telecommunications to ban the site. However users in the capital, Tehran, still could access the application.

The decision to block the photo-sharing app Instagram was accepted by the court due to privacy concerns, the latest in a series of websites to be banned in the Islamic Republic. Citizens of the country complained that the social network breaks confidentiality of their data.