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We've known about side-channel attacks on SMP/hyperthreading implementations since Intel started selling chips with the technology. That's back in 2005. The rest of the industry more or less slept on it until someone gave side channel attacks a cool name and logo to worry about.

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Amazon had just recently or was about to release S3, so cloud computing wasn't as much of a thing back then. The oh shit factor of today is because now business that have absolutely no relation to each other are now sharing CPU cores.

Shared hosting has been a thing for a lot longer though. Wouldn't that have been exposed to the same set of vulnerabilities though? I suppose there were lower hanging fruit to exploit though.

In 2005 if your bank rocked up to their regulator explaining that they wanted shared hosting of their financial systems on commodity hosting providers they would have been told to reconsider or lose their banking license.

Now it's carte-blanche to have core financial systems on Amazon, running alongside EC2 instances purchased with stolen credit cards by folks in non-extradition countries.

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