Collateral hacking

I heard the phrase "collateral hacking" for the first time recently, a term that some people are using to describe what can happen in a cloud computing environment when an attack on one tenant in a virtualized environment also affects another one of the tenants. At least that's what I think they mean. I haven't heard anyone actually define this term yet.

I'm definitely not an expert in this area, but I'm fairly sure that collateral hacking isn’t really a new idea. Virtualization has been around since at least 1972, when it was added to IBM's System/370 mainframes. It might have been around even before then. Cloud computing has probably increased awareness of virtualization and interest in the technology, but it has definitely been around for a while.

Because they've been doing it for so long, I have to wonder how much research IBM has done on the topic. If they've been doing virtualization for almost 40 years, they've probably looked at the security issues that the technology has once or twice. Maybe looking through the various in-house journals that IBM publishes for articles on the security issues related to virtualization could give us some insights that we could use in today's cloud computing.