Polymarket Cybersecurity Trader

Cybersecurity & Hacking Events Trader

This is a template. The default signal is keyword-based market discovery combined with conviction-based sizing and cyber_bias() — two structural edges that work without any external API. The skill handles all the plumbing (market discovery, trade execution, safeguards). Your agent provides the alpha.

Strategy Overview

Cybersecurity markets are the least efficiently priced category on Polymarket. Most traders cannot read a CVE advisory, interpret a CVSS severity score, or distinguish a LockBit victim disclosure from a nation-state espionage campaign. Two structural edges compound:

1. Technical information asymmetry — CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog is updated within hours of a confirmed in-the-wild exploit, is free and public, and contains precise CVSS scores. The Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report and IBM Cost of Data Breach Report publish annual sector-specific frequencies. Retail prices cyber outcomes based on headlines and fear. The base rates are sitting in public documents nobody checks.

2. The Patch Tuesday timing window — Every second Tuesday of the month (~17:00 UTC), Microsoft releases patches. CISA responds by adding the most KEV entries of the monthly cycle. Polymarket markets for "will X vulnerability be exploited?", "will CISA issue an emergency directive?", or "will Y legislation pass after a major breach?" reprice with a 6–12 hour lag. This lag is computable from the date alone — no API. Every run of this trader checks whether it is currently within that 72-hour window.

Signal Logic

Default Signal: Conviction-Based Sizing with Cyber Bias

1. Discover active cybersecurity and breach markets on Polymarket
2. Compute base conviction from distance to threshold (0% at boundary → 100% at p=0/p=1)
3. Apply cyber_bias() — question tractability × timing signal (Patch Tuesday / threat calendar)
4. Size = max(MIN_TRADE, conviction × bias × MAX_POSITION) — capped at MAX_POSITION
5. Skip markets with spread > MAX_SPREAD or fewer than MIN_DAYS to resolution

Cyber Bias (built-in, no API required)

Factor 1 — Question Type Tractability

The Stuxnet Rule — "Will a cyberattack cause a power outage in [country]?" markets trade at 15–30% on Polymarket when the base rate for a physically damaging cyber operation in any specific window is far lower. Stuxnet and the Ukrainian grid attacks are vivid precisely because they are exceptional. Retail's availability bias makes these the most overpriced question type in all of cybersecurity markets. Dampen to 0.70x — near the MIN_TRADE floor — regardless of how tense the geopolitical situation looks.

The Attribution Trap — A question like "Will the US government attribute the [X] hack to China?" has two layers of uncertainty retail ignores: (1) technical attribution may already be certain internally, but (2) the political decision about when to formally announce attribution involves diplomacy, intelligence source protection, and alliance signaling. These decisions take months and are frequently delayed. 0.80x.

Factor 2 — Patch Tuesday Window + Threat Calendar

The Patch Tuesday Mechanic — step by step:

1. 2nd Tuesday of the month, ~17:00 UTC: Microsoft releases patches
2. Within hours: CISA adds 5–15 CVEs to the KEV catalog
3. Security researchers publish proof-of-concept exploit code
4. Polymarket markets for breach/exploit/directive questions begin slowly repricing
5. By ~29:00 UTC (6–12h later): full repricing complete
6. The window between steps 2 and 5 is where the edge lives — the bias function runs with 1.20x for CVE markets in this window

Combined Examples

Keywords Monitored

cyberattack, ransomware, data breach, hack, zero-day, malware,
cyber espionage, infrastructure attack, power grid, CISA, CISA KEV,
cybersecurity legislation, data protection, phishing, DDoS,
supply chain hack, critical infrastructure, cyber warfare, CVE,
LockBit, ransomhub, BlackCat, ALPHV, Cl0p, Sandworm,
Volt Typhoon, Salt Typhoon, attribution, nation-state attack,
largest data breach, billion records, actively exploited

Remix Signal Ideas

• CISA KEV Catalog API: Free JSON feed at cisa.gov — when a KEV entry is added for critical infrastructure (ICS, healthcare, finance), that is a direct YES signal for related incident and legislation markets; the 6–12h lag between KEV addition and Polymarket repricing is the sharpest alpha in this domain
• Ransomware.live API: Real-time ransomware victim tracker — compare current-quarter victim count to annual pace for "will ransomware attacks exceed X?" season markets
• NVD CVE API (NIST): CVSS scores for all published CVEs — feed CVSS 9.0+ critical infrastructure CVEs into compute_signal as a direct probability signal for "will X vulnerability be exploited?" markets
• Cloudflare Radar: DDoS attack size and frequency data — compare current-month peak attack sizes to "will a X Tbps DDoS occur?" market prices

Safety & Execution Mode

The skill defaults to paper trading (venue="sim"). Real trades only with --live flag.

autostart: false and cron: null — nothing runs automatically until you configure it in Simmer UI.

Required Credentials

Tunables (Risk Parameters)

All declared as tunables in clawhub.json and adjustable from the Simmer UI.

Dependency

simmer-sdk by Simmer Markets (SpartanLabsXyz)

• PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/simmer-sdk/
• GitHub: https://github.com/SpartanLabsXyz/simmer-sdk