They are similar to the Navy SEALs in that they are heavily trained in airborne and combat diving techniques in order to allow them to bypass traditional land defense systems.
"The last thing the big guys want is to rationalize the system and commoditize themselves out of business, " says Paul McBride, chief financial officer of InterNap, a builder of systems that bypass peering points.
In January of last year, cybersecurity researcher Travis Goodspeed gave a presentation at the S4 conference in Miami where he described a way to bypass encryption on Zigbee wireless chips, which some smart electric metering systems would use to communicate.