Domain Hijacking and DNS Hijacking

Domain Hijacking and DNS Hijacking are sophisticated thefts, former is changing the registration of a domain name and later is the deliberate alteration of DNS. These state of robbery of Domain Hijacking and DNS Hijacking quite obviously happens with medium to bigger well known websites.

What is Domain Hijacking ?

Domain hack is not Domain Hijacking. Domain Hack sounds bad, but actually it is a creative thing which we described before. Unfortunately, not much technical method is known about Domain Hijacking. It is obvious fact a thief will not come to say the step by step guide like us. There are basically two hypothesis for Domain Hijacking :

• There is private key to protect the domains. Transfer is not that easy. So it is taken that Domain Hijacking is generally done by exploiting a vulnerability in the domain name registration system. This basically puts the reseller or seller to a safer position, from legal point of view.
• Second hypothesis is impractical, one have to know all the details of login of domain registration account, hack the emails to redirect and forward them to their inbox. This can only happen if the reseller company is bad. This is quite difficult to proof.

What is DNS Hijacking ?

Unlike Domain Hijacking, DNS Hijacking has practical explanation. Manipulation of the namespace (DNS Mangling) is to alter the information of DNS deliberately before their transmission to the client. The use of this technique is however controversial. Critics describe the servers that handle the data are “DNS liars”.

For practical understanding, you can think DNS Hijacking somewhat like 301 redirection, but basically the redirection happens before the traffic reaches your server. Reason is to steal traffic.

Frequent use of this technique is to replace the NXDOMAIN (provided when a domain name does not exist). Example can be, if you type in browser :

You should get a “Could not locate remote server” like error. That is the normal. In case of DNS Hijacking, it will land to another intended webpage by the ISP when that hell named subdomain is actually not present.

Tips to save yourself from Domain Hijacking and DNS Hijacking

Domain Hijacking and DNS Hijacking are rare with bigger web hosts. The reason is, they actually resell domains, but that is not public but only for the customers. With good webhost, managed server, Domain Hijacking and DNS Hijacking are rare nowadays and happens with those second class and third class resellers, web hosts. You will not give money and how they can employ more employees, use internal own ISP ?