Domain Hijacking

Domain hijacking or domain theft is the act of changing the registration of a domain name without the permission of its original registrant.

This can be financially devastating to the original domain name holder, who may have derived commercial income from a website hosted at the domain or conducted business through that domain's e-mail accounts. Additionally, the hijacker can use the domain name to facilitate illegal activity such as phishing, where a website is replaced by an identical website that records private information such as log-in passwords.