The Justice Department this week challenged a Russian-based software security provider’s lawsuit asking a federal court to overturn a Trump administration ban on its products.

The phasing out of Kaspersky products began after numerous media reports showed how Moscow turned the company’s anti-virus software into a spy tool.

In December, Kaspersky Lab, which denied feeding information to the Kremlin, filed a lawsuit in Washington against the Homeland Security Department. The lawsuit said the U.S. government denied it basic due process when Secretary Elaine Duke banned its software in a September memo.

"DHS has harmed Kaspersky Lab's reputation and its commercial operations without any evidence of wrongdoing by the company," the company's founder, Eugene Kaspersky, said in an open letter to DHS at the time.

President Trump then signed the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act, which instituted a government-wide ban on the use of Kaspersky products beginning in October 2018.

Kaspersky then filed another lawsuit in Washington, calling the latest ban unconstitutional.

Under the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Attainder Clause, Congress is forbidden “from enacting laws which impose individualized deprivations of life, liberty, and property and inflict punishment on individuals and corporations without a judicial trial,” the company’s lawyers argued in the February filing.

In a motion to dismiss the case filed Monday, the Justice Department asserted that both the Trump administration and Congress were responding to a “entirely legitimate national security concern about the government’s current and future use of products or services that could make U.S. networks vulnerable to Russian cyber intrusion.”

“By the time this legislation reached the floor, there was broad agreement among lawmakers and cybersecurity officials in the executive branch that the security risks posed by the use of Kaspersky products and services were intolerably high, and strong bipartisan support for taking preventive action against those risks,” argued Justice Department lawyers.

The U.S. government also countered Kaspersky’s argument that Congress acted unconstitutionally because it “is not required to ‘test’ anything before it legislates.”

The U.S. government also filed a separate motion Monday to dismiss Kaspersky’s lawsuit challenging the DHS’ September ban.

Earlier this year, Kaspersky said the ban is gutting its sales in the U.S.

Though only 1 percent of Kaspersky's sales were in the U.S., the company saw a 50 percent drop in retail bookings in the second half of 2017 compared to the second half of2016.