8 Domain Risks and How to Manage Them

What could possibly go wrong when managing a domain? Buy it once, don’t forget to renew later — and that’s it, right? Well, those who do it for a living know that it’s more than just a set-it-and-forget-it task — there are plenty of other domain risks.

Why it matters (and why admins keep waking up at nights wondering whether they did something wrong with domain configurations) is that the price of making a mistake is very high when it comes to domain management. A single mistake can take down your website, affect email deliverability, or damage customer trust. 

This post breaks down some of the biggest risks associated with domains, illustrates them with real-life examples, and provides a remediation/mitigation/prevention plan.

1. Missed Renewals

That’s the most obvious and universal of all domain risks, but still many end up running into it. Domain name registration has to be renewed when it expires. If it isn’t, the domain stops resolving. That means your website goes offline, and your associated email stops working. If you don't catch it quickly, the domain enters a redemption period, and after that, it goes to an auction (we talked about the domain life cycle here if you need a refresher). 

Once a domain is bought by someone else, it can be used for fraud and other malicious activities, potentially damaging your brand reputation. Getting it back is expensive and difficult since you’d have to go through a rigorous legal process.

Potential impact:

• Website downtime
• Email outages
• Brand damage
• Exposure to fraud risk
• Financial damage due to the expensive recovery process

Example: In one Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (UDRP) case handled by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the complainant (Pacific House, LLC) tried to reclaim the domain libertas[.]org after accidentally letting its registration lapse. The panel denied the request because the respondent (Connor Boyack), who leads the Libertas Institute, had a senior trademark and a legitimate, long-standing interest in the name. Ultimately, the panel found the complaint was brought in bad faith and issued a finding of Reverse Domain Name Hijacking against Pacific House.

How to avoid:

• Enable auto-renew and multi-year registrations to minimize the risk of missed renewal.
• Centralize billing and ownership using corporate accounts rather than individual credit cards.
• Implement registry locks where available for your most important domains to provide an extra layer of security against unauthorized changes or accidental lapses. To learn if you already have registry locks in place, use a WHOIS lookup to check for lines like clientTransferProhibited and serverTransferProhibited and read about their meaning in the Domain Status Codes section of this post.

2. Domain Hijacking 

Somebody can get control of a domain not because you forgot to renew it, but because they found their way into the admin panel of the registrar that you use and changed DNS settings. That’s called domain hijacking. Domain hijacking occurs when an attacker gains access to your domain registrar account through phishing or by using automated credential stuffing to exploit stolen passwords from unrelated data breaches.

Once they’ve taken over the account, the threat actors can change the DNS records to point the domain to their own malicious servers. They can also transfer the domain to a different registrar.

Potential impact:

• Loss of domain (and associated website) ownership
• Email takeover
• Malware distribution
• Reputational damage

Example: The Syrian Electronic Army hijacked the New York Times, Huffington Post UK, and Twitter (now X) domain by compromising their registrar. They changed where the domains pointed, distributing malware to those who tried visiting the sites. 

This attack took a village (Google, Cloudflare, OpenDNS, Verisign, and others) to mitigate. Notably, it occurred not because somebody at the New York Times, Huffington Post, or Twitter made mistakes, but because of the compromise at the registrar level. However, the damage could still have been prevented.

How to avoid:

• Use phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication (MFA), such as FIDO2 and hardware security keys like YubiKeys, for your registrar accounts.
• Implement Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) if your registrar supports it to limit who can make changes to your account. 
• Turn on registry lock for your most important domains to add verification steps before any changes can be made at the registry level. The serverTransferProhibited status we mentioned earlier works at the registry level, which would’ve helped even in the case of registrar hijacking, as in the example above.
• Set up domain monitoring to get notified when changes to your domain settings occur. This would be a late notice, but at least it would allow you to react faster.

3. DNS Compromise and Misconfiguration

Your DNS records can be altered either maliciously or by mistake. Attackers hijack DNS by gaining access to registrar or DNS provider accounts and redirecting traffic to their own servers by changing A or MX records. They can also use cache poisoning to trick DNS resolvers into storing false IP addresses, which sends unsuspecting users to malicious sites.

Misconfigurations, such as lame delegations or incorrect Time-to-Live (TTL) values, can also cause accidental outages. 

Potential impact:

• Traffic redirection
• Website and email outage
• Malware distribution via fake sites
• Reputational damage

Example: In 2020, several cryptocurrency platforms, including Liquid and NiceHash, suffered DNS compromises. Attackers hijacked the companies’ DNS records and attempted to redirect traffic to intercept user credentials.

How to avoid:

• Implement Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) to add a digital signature to your DNS records, ensuring that the information your users receive is authentic and hasn't been tampered with.
• Implement change control and approval so that every DNS modification is documented and approved by a second person.
• Use a secondary DNS provider. If your primary provider goes down, your secondary provider can keep your traffic flowing.
• Monitor DNS record changes in real-time using DNS monitoring services.

4. Brand Impersonation and Lookalike Domains

Attackers register domains that look almost exactly like yours. They might use typosquatting (examp1e[.]com instead of example[.]com) or homographs (using foreign characters that look like English letters). These domains — known as lookalike domains — are then used to trick your customers into revealing their passwords or paying fake invoices.

Potential impact:

• Phishing
• Invoice fraud
• Credential theft
• Customer trust erosion

Example: In the first quarter of 2023, we found over 12,000 domains that contain the names of the most-impersonated brands, and hundreds of those were flagged malicious and resolved to websites that look similar to the imitated companies. Below are some examples.

How to avoid:

• Defensive registrations: If you own example[.]com, consider buying example[.]net and example[.]org, as well as common typos such as exampe[.]com. In many cases, it's cheaper to own them than to fight a legal battle to claim them and combat typosquatters.
• Brand monitoring: Use brand monitoring tools that scan for new domain registrations containing your brand name and trademarks and alert you immediately when a lookalike domain is registered.

• Takedown workflow: Have a detailed plan for when someone on your team (or the brand monitor above) discovers a lookalike site. Know how to contact the hosting provider and the registrar to report abuse.

5. Email Spoofing 

If you haven't set up your email authentication correctly, anyone can send an email that looks like it came from your domain. This can lead to Business Email Compromise (BEC) scams, where attackers impersonate an executive and ask an employee to wire money to a fraudulent account.

Potential impact:

• Phishing
• BEC scams
• Fraud
• Email deliverability issues
• Brand damage

Example: In 2016, the Austrian aerospace parts maker FACC lost roughly $56 million. The attack started with an entry-level accountant receiving an email that appeared to come from the CEO. In reality, the attacker spoofed the display name to make the email look like it originated from the CEO’s email account.

How to avoid:

• Implement SPF, DKIM, and DMARC correctly so that all emails are verified. Start by running DNS lookups to see if you have all three records configured. You can use DNS Lookup API to check TXT records of your domain and check if SPF is present. 

Assume we’re trying to do this for bbc[.]com. The API request will look like this:

curl "https://www.whoisxmlapi.com/whoisserver/DNSService?apiKey=YOUR_API_KEY&domainName=bbc.com&type=TXT"

The output is quite long, but since we’re looking for SPF, we can just search for it in the output and find this:

<TXTRecord>
      <type>16</type>
      <dnsType>TXT</dnsType>
      <name>bbc.com.</name>
      <ttl>300</ttl>
      <rRsetType>16</rRsetType>
      <rawText>bbc.com.		300	IN	TXT	"v=spf1 ip4:212.58.224.0/19 ip4:132.185.0.0/16 +include:spf.messagelabs.com ~all"</rawText>
      <strings>
        <string>v=spf1 ip4:212.58.224.0/19 ip4:132.185.0.0/16 +include:spf.messagelabs.com ~all</string>
      </strings>
    </TXTRecord>

This proves that bbc[.]com has SPF configured and shows the configuration specifics.

To see if DMARC is configured as well, you can use the same DNS Lookup API, checking the subdomain of the same domain with the “_dmarc” label for TXT records. If we’re looking up DMARC for the same bbc[.]com, for example, the API request will look like this:

curl "https://www.whoisxmlapi.com/whoisserver/DNSService?apiKey=YOUR_API_KEY&domainName=_dmarc.bbc.com&type=TXT"

And the response looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><DNSData>
  <domainName>_dmarc.bbc.com</domainName>
  <types>
    <int>16</int>
  </types>
  <dnsTypes>TXT</dnsTypes>
  <audit>
    <createdDate>2026-02-24 13:52:54 UTC</createdDate>
    <updatedDate>2026-02-24 13:52:54 UTC</updatedDate>
  </audit>
  <dnsRecords>
    <TXTRecord>
      <type>16</type>
      <dnsType>TXT</dnsType>
      <name>_dmarc.bbc.com.</name>
      <ttl>2902</ttl>
      <rRsetType>16</rRsetType>
      <rawText>_dmarc.bbc.com.		2902	IN	TXT	"v=DMARC1;p=reject;aspf=s;adkim=s;pct=100;fo=0;ri=86400; rua=mailto:[email protected];"</rawText>
      <strings>
        <string>v=DMARC1;p=reject;aspf=s;adkim=s;pct=100;fo=0;ri=86400; rua=mailto:[email protected];</string>
      </strings>
    </TXTRecord>
  </dnsRecords>
</DNSData>

• Enforce DMARC by starting with a p=none policy to monitor traffic, then gradually move to p=quarantine and finally p=reject to block unauthorized emails. In the example above, bbc[.]com is clearly following the best practices, having p=reject in its DMARC record.
• Audit DMARC reports to identify shadow senders (unauthorized or forgotten third-party services, like marketing platforms or HR tools, that send mail on behalf of a domain)

6. SSL/TLS Certificate Risks 

SSL/TLS certificates enable secure communications with your website, and when they expire (or are issued improperly), visitors will see a "Your connection is not private" warning that implies that your site may be compromised. Even worse, if an attacker gets a fake certificate for your domain, they can sit between you and your customers to steal passwords and credit card data in a man-in-the-middle (MiTM) attack.

Potential impact:

• Website outages
• Loss of customer confidence
• MiTM attacks (in the case of a certificate compromise)

Example: In 2020, Spotify forgot to renew a certificate, which crashed their web player and desktop apps globally for several hours. This oversight resulted in a PR headache, money losses, and millions of frustrated users. The certificate being a wildcard made the situation even worse, as one expired certificate resulted in a variety of things breaking.

How to avoid:

• Create an inventory of every certificate you own, where it lives, and when it expires, because you cannot protect what you do not track. Use the SSL Certificates API or lookup to verify the details you need.

• Use the ACME protocol through services like Let’s Encrypt to handle renewals automatically and reduce the risk of human error.
• Monitor Certificate Transparency (CT) logs regularly to see if unauthorized certificates are being issued for your domains. 

7. Supply Chain Exposure and Ownership Ambiguity

Many companies hire outside agencies to build websites or manage marketing. If that agency registers your domain using their own account, they effectively own it. If that agency gets hacked, the contract ends, or you have a falling-out with them, you could lose control of your domain.

Potential impact:

• Account takeover
• Slow incident response
• Loss of domain

Example: A Reddit user sought the community for help after their web developer ghosted them, leaving the team without administrative access to their Drupal site, domain registration, and branded emails. The user needed to secure the domain registration and create email addresses for new hires. Since the developer had blocked all communication and no formal contract existed, the user needed a way to regain control over a domain that they considered theirs, but formally, it was registered by the developer.

How to avoid:

• Retain ownership: Ensure your company is listed as the "Registrant" in the WHOIS records. The agency can be the "Technical Contact," but they should never be the owner. If you need to check these WHOIS fields right now, you can use the WHOIS API. Note that they might be redacted for privacy, though.

• Implement least privilege access: Give vendors only the access they absolutely need. If they only need to update DNS a couple of times, you can probably do it for them instead of giving them access.
• Create an offboarding checklist: When a contract is about to end, rotate all passwords and remove their access to your DNS and registrar accounts, as well as website admin panels.

8. Website Defacement

When the visual appearance or copy of a website suddenly changes, that may indicate a web defacement attack, where hackers replace a site's content with their own messages. Attackers achieve this by exploiting unpatched software vulnerabilities or weak administrative credentials in a website's content management system (CMS). They either use stolen access credentials or chain vulnerabilities together to gain sufficient privileges and overwrite the site's index files.

A Trend Micro study of millions of defacement incidents revealed that most attacks are driven by hacktivism — threat actors seeking social or political change.

Potential impact:

• Loss of brand trust
• Downtime
• Loss of revenue

Example: In 2018, attackers defaced the National Health Service (NHS) website insights[.]london[.]nhs[.]uk, giving it a black background with a message that said "Hacked by AnoaGhost — Typical Idiot Security."

How to avoid:

• Use File Integrity Monitoring (FIM) and other tools that alert you when a file on your web server is changed.
• Employ a Web Application Firewall (WAF) to block many of the common exploits used to gain the access needed for defacement.
• Keep your web server software, CMS, and plugins updated. Follow security hardening guides to limit the attack surface of your web server.
• Use external monitoring services that specifically check for visual changes on your homepage.

Conclusion

Securing a domain requires a proactive approach that covers both technical settings and administrative habits. You can prevent most domain risks by enabling registrar locks, using multi-factor authentication, and setting up auto-renewal to avoid accidental expirations. 

Adding layers like DNSSEC further protects your traffic and your personal data from bad actors. Consistent brand monitoring and defensive registrations will also help you maintain a reliable and professional online presence.