DNS hijacking is uniquely dangerous because users can type the correct domain into their browser and still be silently redirected to a harmful site.
When CoW Swap disclosed a DNS hijacking incident, the most important detail for enterprise teams wasn’t that a website went offline; it was that it didn’t. The backend, APIs, and protocol remained intact — so to your average user, the website looked normal and legitimate.
The compromise happened at the domain layer. That means that users typed in the correct domain or URL, and yet they were silently redirected to a malicious frontend that looked identical to the real one. Worse? Anyone interacting with the site during that window exposed themself to risk.
Your customer’s online brand journey starts with trust in your name. If your DNS can be changed without the right safeguards, who’s to say that your customers’ trust can’t be just as easily redirected?
What Is DNS Hijacking?
DNS hijacking is the unauthorized manipulation of a domain name system record or resolution path that redirects users from a legitimate domain to a different destination, often malicious. In a DNS hijacking attack, the user may type the correct URL and still land on a fake site, because the attacker has interfered with how the domain resolves.
This is what makes DNS hijacking especially dangerous for enterprise brands. The user is not interacting with a misspelled domain, a suspicious email, or an obvious lookalike — they are using the right online address, but the domain layer has been compromised and is sending them somewhere else.
Why DNS Hijacking Is an Enterprise Brand Protection Risk
The CoW Swap DNS hijack demonstrates a critical gap in how organizations think about security — nothing in the core infrastructure was compromised, yet users were still exposed. The attack exploited the domain layer, where trust is assumed but often weakly controlled.
Any organization, regardless of size or industry, is vulnerable to DNS hijacking if the domain layer is not governed with appropriate controls as the domain layer is a structural risk for any enterprise managing multiple domains across teams, systems, and registrars.
Savvy organizations are strengthening controls at the domain layer because this type of vulnerability is not mitigated by securing backend systems or engaging with secure cloud environments. It requires working with a registrar that enforces strict verification, monitoring and escalation processes, ensuring that DNS changes cannot be made without predefined safeguards and documented authorization procedures. And when you work with Markmonitor, you can be sure that such protective measures are defined and adhered to.
DNS Abuse Operates at Enterprise Scale
ICANN describes DNS abuse as malware, botnets, phishing, pharming, and spam when used to deliver those harms. ICANN also reported that its enforcement of DNS abuse mitigation requirements from April 2024 to August 2025 directly mitigated nearly 20,000 malicious domain names, while registrar and registry process changes led to the mitigation of hundreds of thousands more.
Those figures should stop organizations in their tracks and cause them to think carefully about domain security. Domain-layer abuse isn’t occasional. It’s constant, with attackers continuously cycling through infrastructure at speed.
How Fragmented Corporate Domain Portfolios Increase DNS Risk
DNS risk rarely sits in one obvious place; instead, it quietly sprawls across the corporate domain portfolio:
- Domains registered by regional teams
- Legacy domains inherited through acquisitions
- Campaign domains created by agencies
- Redirects and parked domains with weak configuration
- Different registrars with different controls
- Unclear ownership for DNS approvals
This is why managing multiple domain names efficiently is also a security issue. A fragmented portfolio creates more systems to secure, more credentials to govern, more renewal paths to monitor, and more opportunities for an attacker to find a weaker, circumventable process.
The Model Matters: Retail vs Corporate Domain Name Registrars
Retail registrars are usually optimized for speed, low friction, and self-service. That’s a reasonable model for simple use cases or smaller individual operators, but it becomes a riskier choice for organizations whose domains support revenue, authentication, regulated communications, or customer trust.
Let’s be clear: the issue is not that retail registrars are categorically unsafe.
The issue is that high-value domains require controlled access, defined points of contact, stronger authentication, change governance, registry relationships, and custom escalation paths during moments of crisis when minutes matter. All of those benefits are offered via a different operating model: the corporate domain name registrar, like Markmonitor.
And it isn’t just us who think so — regulators are paying more and more attention to baseline security practices and calling out those who don’t.
In 2025, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission finalized an order with GoDaddy after alleging failures that included lack of multi-factor authentication, inadequate monitoring for security threats, and insecure connections to consumer data. The FTC also said those failures contributed to breaches that allowed unauthorized access to customer websites and data.
How Registry Lock Helps Prevent Unauthorized DNS Changes
Registry Lock introduces a control at the registry level, independent of the security measures provided via your registrar, and often available only via corporate domain registrars.
Registry Lock requires manual, multi-factor verification through predefined authorization channels for any attempt to modify DNS records, transfer a domain, or change ownership. This process introduces friction by design — breaking the typical attack path seen in DNS hijacking, where compromised credentials are used to execute immediate changes.
Fundamentally, Registry Lock assumes account access can be breached and prevents that access from escalating into domain-level impact.
For domains that support transactional sites, email systems, customer portals, employee access, investor communications, or product infrastructure, Registry Lock turns domain control from a simple account action into a governed approval process.
Elements of Secure Domain Management
When it comes to keeping your brand protected online, security starts at the domain layer. No single control eliminates every DNS risk, but each one reduces the chance that an attacker can harm your organization. For secure domain management, consider:
- Use Registry Lock to Protect Critical Domains From Unauthorized Changes
Registry Lock adds a higher level of control at the registry level, helping prevent unauthorized changes to domain records. For critical domains, that extra approval path can be the difference between a failed attempt and a public incident. - Strengthen Registrar Access Controls and User Permissions
Enterprise domain management should use unique user accounts, multi-factor authentication, role-based permissions, access restrictions, and controlled change workflows. Shared credentials and broad access are not acceptable for critical business infrastructure like domains. - Govern DNS Changes With Approval, Logging, and Monitoring
DNS changes should be reviewed, logged, and monitored. Teams need to know who requested a change, who approved it, what changed, and whether the change matches business intent. - Consolidate Your Domain Portfolio to Reduce Security Gaps
Managing domains across multiple registrars makes security harder to prove and harder to operate. Consolidation gives security, legal, IT, and brand teams a cleaner way to govern access, renewals, locks, DNS settings, and portfolio reporting. - Continuously Monitor Lookalike Domains, Phishing, and Brand Impersonation Threats
Attackers do not need to hijack your domain if they can register a convincing lookalike. Monitoring confusingly similar domains, phishing infrastructure, impersonation attempts, and suspicious registrations helps teams prioritize action before customer harm escalates. - Secure Parked, Defensive, and Redirected Domains
Inactive does not mean harmless. Parked, defensive, and redirected domains still need secure configuration, HTTPS support, email security records where appropriate, and clear ownership.
Does Managing Multiple Domains Increase DNS Risk?
The larger the portfolio, the more dangerous informal management becomes, thereby increasing the risk your organization faces.
A company with dozens, hundreds, or thousands of domain names cannot rely on memory, spreadsheets, inherited registrar accounts, or local business unit ownership. Those practices create blind spots and slow response times when something urgent happens.
Efficiency is a huge benefit of enterprise domain consolidation, but at heart, it’s about reducing the number of places where control can fail and risk can thrive.
Beyond that, a consolidated corporate domain portfolio gives teams the ability to answer operational and risk questions without delay:
- Which domains are truly business-critical, and what would the impact be if they were compromised or unavailable?
- Which domains are protected with Registry Lock or equivalent controls, and which are not?
- Who has access to each domain, and is that access appropriate, current, and auditable?
- Where do gaps exist in DNS governance, renewal management, or registrar-level controls?
- Which domains actively support customer journeys, and which exist only for defense, redirection, or legacy use?
- Which domains introduce unnecessary risk due to inactivity, misconfiguration, or unclear ownership?
- What external domains are most likely to be used for impersonation, phishing, or fraud against the brand?
- Which identified threats require monitoring, enforcement, acquisition, or escalation, and on what timeline?
While these may appear to be administrative questions, their answers speak to points that influence and drive fundamental business decisions. And while the answers to these questions matter in steady-state operations, they matter more during a live incident.
Threat Intelligence: Domain Monitoring Helps Detect Lookalikes, Phishing, and Brand Impersonation
Attackers do not need to hijack your domain if they can register a convincing alternative. They can use typo variants, homoglyphs, brand plus keyword combinations, and high-risk TLDs to impersonate the brand, host deceptive pages, or send phishing emails.
DomainWatch scans hundreds of millions of registered domain names daily and applies AI-driven analysis to identify and prioritize the highest-risk threats. There’s a great deal of practical value to be had in prioritization, because enterprise teams cannot manually review every potential domain risk to a brand.
Monitoring with DomainWatch turns a broad namespace problem into an actionable risk queue for organizations and is a critical tool to have when enforcement budgets, legal capacity, and security attention are limited.
Protection From DNS Hijacking Starts With Domain Governance
DNS hijacking is a reminder that the domain layer is not peripheral infrastructure: it’s where customers, attackers, browsers, email systems, search engines, and security teams all meet.
If your organization manages multiple domain names across split domain registrars, inherited accounts, inconsistent controls, or unclear ownership, that is a security and governance issue. It may also be a brand-protection issue, a customer-trust issue, and a continuity issue.
The next step is to review the portfolio you have, identify the domains that matter most, apply stronger controls where risk is highest, consolidate where fragmentation creates exposure, and monitor the spaces where attackers are likely to imitate your brand.
Markmonitor helps enterprise organizations bring that discipline to domain management, so the corporate domain portfolio is easier to govern, harder to compromise, and better aligned to the way online brand risk actually appears.
