DNS Hijacking 101: How It Happens and What You Can Do to Prevent It
Akamai Technologies, October 1,2025
In this blog post, we'll explain what DNS hijacking is, what types and techniques cybercriminals use, and how to protect DNS servers from this attack. This should help you understand the threat of DNS hijacking and determine which cybersecurity measures you need to prevent your DNS servers from being compromised.
To understand DNS hijacking, you must first understand the ins and outs of DNS. Let's start there.
What is DNS?
DNS stands for Domain Name System. You can think of DNS as a phone book for the internet. Essentially, it's a protocol that turns human-readable domain names (like www.akamai.com) into computer-readable IP addresses (sets of four numbers separated by periods).
The human brain can't memorize strings of numbers quite as easily as computers can, so we created domain names for each website that correspond to the IP addresses.
Each domain and its corresponding IP address for every website is held by an authoritative nameserver somewhere in the world. The process of retrieving that information - to connect a user to their desired website - is known as DNS resolution.
What is DNS hijacking?
DNS hijacking is a type of cyberattack in which a cybercriminal directs traffic to an imposter site in an attempt to steal sensitive information by exploiting DNS resolution.