June 20, 2023: Congratulations to the top 3 prize winners of the White Hat Cyber Tournament, Sune, Vang, and mag00, and thank you to all who participated! Check out this discussion post to learn more.

Welcome to the White Hat Cyber Forecasting Tournament!

This tournament, sponsored by R Street Institute and Red Branch Consulting, asks the Metaculus Community to forecast on a range of cybersecurity topics, with a particular focus on trends in geopolitics, government and government policy, events and incidents, industry statistics, and ransomware.

The ultimate goal of this project is to identify how and under what circumstances open-source, unclassified crowd-forecasting communities can generate accurate forecasts that could make it easier for practitioners and policymakers to make informed decisions to improve cybersecurity decision making.

This tournament has a prize pool of $2,500 and will consist of approximately 30 questions that will be resolved by June 1, 2023. Forecasting will begin in three staggered waves on March 8, March 15, and March 22, 2022, so that forecasters have time to spread out their research efforts. Forecasting will end on Dec 31, 2022.

As usual, the community prediction will be hidden when forecasting first opens. Importantly, forecasts during this hidden period determine a forecaster's "coverage" and their tournament ranking, so forecasting early is key if you want to win prizes. (The hidden period will be set to 25% of a question's duration for questions that close before 9/1/22 and 10% for longer duration questions.) Your forecast accuracy on questions is, as always, determined by your forecasts over the entire duration of a question. Feedback is welcome.