It's a seller's market for the cyber war's specialforces.

Just ask Scott Davies, 30, who left a careersnooping on Australia's enemies in December for a similar gigat FireEye Inc. Or Brian Varner, 35, who swapped a job with theU.S. Department of Defense breaking into networks in the MiddleEast and other hot zones to be a security engineer at SymantecCorp.

“I have a blank canvas to paint whatever I want,” says Varner,exulting at the lack of bureaucracy, not to mention hisability to work remotely from Florida.

All told, cybersecurity companies have hired hundreds ofex-government sleuths in recent years, capitalizing on theboom in business caused by hackers who stole more than 1billion records in attacks last year. The former spies,cyber-warriors, and government-groomed hackers are becoming thecornerstone of the cybersecurity services industry, which isprojected to bring in more than $48 billion in revenue nextyear, up 41 percent from 2012, according to Gartner Inc.

“The people coming out of the military and the intelligencecommunity are really, really good,” says Nir Zuk, co-founderof Palo Alto Networks Inc. and himself a former Israeli armycomputer hacker. “They know the attackers. They know how theywork.”

FireEye has hired more than 100 former government hackers since2013, part of an international expansion that has cost more thanUS$1 billion, according to Chief Executive Officer Dave DeWalt.Symantec has increased the size of its security services divisionby almost a third, to 500 people, in the past year.

Even smaller companies are snagging top talent. Lacoon MobileSecurity, a mobile-security startup that Check Point SoftwareTechnologies Ltd. agreed to buy this month, has hired 15 peoplefrom Israel's Unit 8200, said Michael Shaulov, a Lacoon co-founderwho, like Zuk, served in the Israeli military's computer-hackinggroup. The hires usually had five to eight competing offers andeach earned more than $100,000 straight out of the armed services,Shaulov said.

“There's a bit of a run on security talent,” said Rob Owens, ananalyst at Pacific Crest Securities in Portland, Oregon, whohas covered the industry for almost 20 years.

While CVs that include government hacking can superchargecareers, they're not a guarantee of safety—or an easy fit incorporate America.

Bloomberg reportedin February that JPMorgan Chase & Co. hasput two former Air Force colonels in its cybersecurity division andthat they clashed with the FBI, Secret Service, and some members oftheir own staff about their insistence that Russia's intelligenceservices were behind a hacking attack on the bank last year. Lawenforcement has determined the attack was the work of ordinarycyber-criminals, and insiders said the clash was an example of howmilitary training can cause some to see state-sponsored attackswhere there are none. At Palo Alto Networks, one of Zuk's recenthires was Chief Security Officer Rick Howard, who spent more thantwo decades in the U.S. Army. He last served as chief of thecomputer emergency response team before entering the privatesector. The $1 billion FireEye has spent on expansion is on top ofthe 2013 acquisition of Mandiant, a data-breach investigationscompany, which was founded by former Air Force special agent KevinMandia. That deal was valued at $1.05 billion.

Some investors have been leery of the costs of the addedheadcount.

FireEye spends 48 percent of revenue on research anddevelopment, the highest ratio of any of the 31 companies in theISE Cyber Security Index, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.The index average is 18 percent.

While FireEye's shares fell from a high of $95.63 in Marchof last year to a low of $25.76 in October, in large part becauseof concerns about spending, the stock is up more than 30 percentthis year amid signs that DeWalt's pitch to investors is gainingsome traction.

“The costs are so much bigger now for the security industry thanthey ever were—the threat landscape has changed so much,” DeWaltsaid. “You can't just have a product. You need the people to matchit. There's no shiny bullet that does it all.”

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