2026 is here, and the cloud security landscape is shifting rapidly. AI is reshaping how attackers operate, supply chains remain under siege, and the definition of resilience itself is evolving. With organizations now at a critical juncture, the security leaders and teams that thrive this year will be those who embrace transformation rather than resist it.
To help you prepare, we’ve gathered insights from Orca Security’s top research and innovation experts. Here are the predictions that matter most for your organization in 2026.
Prediction #1: AI Fluency Will Become a Core C-Suite Skill
Gil Geron, CEO and Co-founder, Orca Security
In 2026, the leaders who win will treat AI as a business capability, not a side project. The best CISOs and CEOs will set clear rules for where AI can help, how decisions get made, and how results are measured. They will empower teams across Security, IT, and DevOps to use AI to fix problems end to end, not just create more alerts. Success will look like faster recovery times, fewer repeat incidents, and simpler workflows that anyone can follow. Organizations that hesitate or ban AI outright will fall behind competitors that build practical playbooks and train their people to use them.
Prediction #2: Outages and Mandates Drive Multi-Cloud From Convenience to Necessity
Avi Shua, Chief Innovation Officer and Co-Founder, Orca Security
The definition of multi-cloud is expanding, driven by geopolitical demands and reliability concerns. Global data residency rules and repeated major outages are revealing a hard truth: spreading workloads within one provider is no longer enough. True resilience now requires deliberate diversification across multiple clouds. By 2026, businesses will shift from convenience and centralization to smarter, distributed architectures built to withstand both geopolitical and technical disruption.
Prediction #3: Quantum Readiness Is Going to Become a Real Planning Problem
Tim Chase, Field CISO, Orca Security
In 2026, CISOs are going to be asked to show what their organizations are doing to prepare for post-quantum cryptography. Major cloud providers are already testing quantum-resistant ciphers inside core services. With no clear agreement on which algorithms can endure true quantum computing power, organizations must prepare for change without full visibility. That means identifying assets at risk from outdated encryption and gauging the complexity of unwinding those dependencies. The companies that start this inventory and planning work early will avoid a far more expensive and rushed migration later.
Prediction #4: GitHub Will Dominate Supply Chain Attacks in 2026
Roi Nisimi, Senior Security Researcher, Orca Security
Whatever vector, it will be GitHub-focused. GitHub has clearly positioned itself as the gift that keeps on giving for malicious actors. Now, more than ever before, attackers target GitHub Apps and GitHub Actions for exploitation, infiltrate into popular GitHub Repositories as contributors, and even host their own malicious content on GitHub. A relatively low effort combined with a tremendous profit guarantees adversaries will keep focusing on GitHub in 2026.
GitHub Actions, or any other CI/CD integration, serves attackers as RCE-as-a-service. Add a misconfiguration to this mixer and you get a severe vulnerability. The fact that anyone can trigger a CI/CD workflow by creating a pull request, for example, should stand as an urgent warning for any repository maintainer. Because these pipelines are highly sensitive (with cloud credentials, third-party tokens, and excessive repository privileges), they wouldn’t get off the black hats radar.
Prediction #5: The Cyber-AI Arms Race Begins in Earnest
Tohar Braun, Security Research Tech Lead, Orca Security
Code analysis tools are becoming more mature, AI red-team platforms are starting to pop up, and we’ve just seen the first instances of AI-driven malware. Up to this point we’ve seen both attackers and defenders using AI to augment their capabilities. This year we’ll be seeing AI defenders versus AI attackers, with humans steering them behind the scenes.
AI-driven attackers are just now gaining traction, so the ROI they provide is still quite low. Attackers will keep using their tried-and-tested methods for finding initial entry points and misconfigurations, but once inside an environment, the AI agents will really start to shine by processing a lot of information at once. These AI-driven attacks are going to be mostly what we call post-exploitation, causing the most amount of damage inside an environment within the shortest amount of time.
Looking Ahead
2026 will demand more from security leaders than ever before. Quantum readiness, AI governance, multi-cloud architecture, supply chain security, and AI-driven defense aren’t optional considerations. They’re immediate imperatives. The organizations that move forward on all these fronts will be prepared for what comes next. Those that hesitate will find themselves playing catch-up on multiple fronts simultaneously.
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