What is a salami attack?

Nope, I don't think @munkeyoto has got the right idea.

The following passage is from Bruce Schneier's Secret And Lies.

There’s the so-called salami attack of stealing the fractions of pennies, one slice at a time, from everyone’s interest-bearing accounts; this is a beautiful example of something that just would not have been possible without computers.

A salami attack is a small attack that can be repeated many times very efficiently. Thus the combined output of the attack is great. In the example above, it refers to stealing the round-off from interest in bank accounts. Even though it is less than 1 cent per account, when multiplied by millions of accounts over many months, the adversary can retrieve quite a large amount. It is also less likely to be noticable since your average customer would assume that the amount was rounded down to the nearest cent.

The chained exploits that munkeyoto is referring to is a series of different exploits each having a small impact but when combined, has a large impact.

Salami attack is when small attacks add up to one major attack that can go undetected due to the nature of this type of cyber crime. It also known as salami slicing/penny shaving where the attacker uses an online database to seize the information of customers, that is bank/credit card details, deducting minuscule amounts from every account over a period of time. These amounts naturally add up to large sums of money that is unnoticeably taken from the collective accounts. Most people do not report the deduction, often letting it go because of the amount involved. This could be a fraction of a cent, so as to avoid suspicion from the unsuspecting customer