Want to learn software security? We'll pay you to do interesting work over the summer. We're weird like that.
We work for vendors and enterprises (ie, normal companies). Vendors bring us in to beat stuff up before they ship it. Enterprises bring us in to reverse things and beat them up before they get deployed.
Yes, many companies aren't that proactive. But the industry is slowly getting dragged into security; key verticals like financial services and health care are starting to require documentation of penetration testing for anything that gets deployed, and Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, Apple, and IBM all have religion about software security process.
I can most definitely vouch for that.