Collateral hacking refers to when a company’s critical data is compromised as a result of a third party in possession of the company’s sensitive data being hacked. Rather than directly hacking into a company, collateral hackers go through a third party in order to get to the company’s sensitive data.
Collateral hacking frequently results in additional companies having their data compromised, as the third party firm will often have the data of numerous companies stored on the hacked server or resource. The security concern of collateral hacking has become more prevalent with the increasing popularity of companies storing sensitive data via server virtualization, in the cloud or with other third-party storage hosting services.