Symantec filed lawsuit against security startup Zscaler in the U.S. Federal District Court for the District of Delaware claiming the company infringed on seven patents.

Symantec says that Zscaler products infringe on seven of Symantec’s patents across its network security technologies including web security, data loss prevention, threat prevention, access control, and antivirus techniques.

Most of the patents pertain to gathering data and extracting information from it. For example, these patents allow Symantec to do things like detect and prevent malicious code, scan streamed data, manage the transmission of a requested computer file, or extract information to identify attack signatures.

Some of Zscaler’s products include a secure web gateway, Advanced Threat Protection (APT), policy management, user authentication, data-loss prevention, application visibility, and mobile security.

Zscaler's secure web gateway uses a remote filtering gateway between a company’s end users and the Internet. This requires the extracting and analyzing information coming through that filter.

“We learned of Symantec’s lawsuit from their press release issued yesterday afternoon and are in the very early stages of assessing their claims. While we are unable to comment on the merits of their claims at this time, we defend ourselves vigorously against lawsuits of this nature,” Robert Schlossman, Zscaler’s chief legal officer wrote to SDxCentral in an email.