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If he has control over the domain but not the server, it's man in the middle. He'd have to redirect the nameservers to a new server, which would either request html from the original server and add malware on the fly, or create a replica of the original site with extra added malware.

Either way, though, without the private key to the SSL certificate, which he won't have without the original server, he can't pretend to be the original site on the other end of an SSL connection.



It doesn't matter if he has the private keys of the original server. He can MITM it with a brand new fully authenticated official SSL cert because he now owns the domain.

   Orig. Server <-- SSL --> MITM Server <-- SSL --> Client
The only thing that usually prevents this is that the MITM Server normally can't get an authenticated SSL cert for the domain and so the client can detect the fake cert.

If SSL worked like SSH then your browser would whine that the cert changed but the browsers currently don't do that. I think even convergence (http://convergence.io/) wouldn't detect this case because it looks to the outside world to be totally legit. Scary.




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