[tptacek]

Two giant government contractors that happen to have small security teams, and one tiny boutique firm. The funny thing is you didn't mention Raytheon or Lockheed, both of which have teams that I suspect are larger than the three teams you mentioned put together. All of them are dwarfed by the commercial security industry. Most of them are backwaters nobody in the field thinks about when they think about security.

[Kalium]

This is an embarrassing admission: I couldn't remember how to spell Raytheon.

I do know that the people in those fields tend to think of themselves as "the security industry". They also don't generally work on material that the more private-sector-focused industry cares about or gets exposed to, like how to secure a network when you have brain-damaged political network policies.

I'll have to keep a tally at the next DEFCON.

[tptacek]

I think you need to be more careful about how you word this.

It is a true but very uninteresting statement to say that "most government contracting work is thinly veiled government work".

Obviously, you don't feel like that's what you're saying. But to defend the statement that much of security in general is thinly veiled USG work, you cite SAIC, ManTech, and (now) Raytheon. Giant government contractors.

The security industry as a whole is enormous. It includes big chunks of Cisco, IBM, EMC, Symantec, Intel, and HP, and literally hundreds of companies the likes of Duo, Cloudflare, Accuvant, and Lookout.

The clear implication of your comment upthread is that most commercial security work is not only done for the USG, but is offensive work done for NSA. That's why you compared it to HackerOne and called their rates a "sick joke". Not only would that statement still not be true if most commercial offensive work was done by NSA (government rates on vulnerabilities are not as lucrative as extragovernmental rates are), but it is itself not true at all. Ironically, the numbers get even worse for your argument when we narrow the security industry down to offensive work.

I might lose an argument about how much bogus "defensive" security product stuff gets sold through GSA teams to NSA and DoD in general. But most of my experience --- apart from the four years I spent working for what was at the time Sandvine's biggest competitor, where we never once had a discussion about selling to NSA --- is on the offensive side. Virtually none of the commercial offensive security work that is done is done to benefit NSA.

[Kalium]

I think you're right, I do need to be much more careful.

I didn't mean to imply that most commercial security work was offensive work for the NSA.