The U.S. government and energy sector need to seriously allocate more resources to protect power infrastructure and the evolving smart grid. Companies I believe are carving out a really nice piece of the cybersecurity market vary from large behemoths like Northrop Grumman (NOC 1.34%), Lockheed Martin (LMT 1.45%) and Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH 1.47%) to up and coming players such as SourceFire (FIRE.DL) and FireEye (MNDT), a company which just went public and has seen its shares soar thanks to strong expectations for virtual security technology.
Did you know that Lockheed gets roughly 20% of total sales from cyber-related activities? So this defense giant should not be ignored as a play on guarding the smart grid and the modernization of energy infrastructure, especially since according to Blue Coat's "Threat Lab," there was nearly 4.3 million daily threats alone in the week of September 16-22. I believe investors may be able to benefit from an increased amount of upcoming joint ventures and perhaps even from outright M&A of cybersecurity energy solutions.
