Space Piracy is a recurring problem in regions with some combination of diffuse population and weak law enforcement (sometimes due to jurisdictional cloudiness.)
The term "Space Piracy," while evocative, gives a misleading impression of the activity. Ships are almost never boarded and captured in deep space under threat of violence or after actual combat. Rather, the term encompasses a huge variety of mostly economically-motivated crimes involving commercial space travel. Some examples follow.
Extortion in orbit often appears near ports with an ineffective (or absent) orbital guard. Pirates use anonymous communication channels to issue threats to ship operators, demanding something - usually cryptocurrency or specie - in exchange for leaving that operator's ships alone. If their threat is ignored, they use improvised drone ships to destroy vessels in orbit. The drones are typically controlled from mobile control stations embedded in dense civilian populations, often constructed of non-incriminating commodity technology which is abandoned or memory-wiped immediately after use. This crime is controlled by good human and signals intelligence (e.g. infiltrating pirate gangs, rapidly tracing the control signals of unauthorized drones and catching their operators red-handed), investigating clandestine shipyards where some improvised drones are made, and blasting unauthorized drones that approach too close to other ships. The latter is the most effective in the short term - some merchant ships travelling in dangerous areas will do it themselves, though it imposes a considerable economic cost.
Often, pirates will selectively target huge unmanned cargo ships, knowing that destroying crewed ships will arouse a more immediate and severe response.
Uncrewed Ship Hijacking is somewhat common. Spoofed control signals are sent to an uncrewed cargo ship, and either the ship is diverted to some location where it can safely be plundered, or the pirates demand payment in exchange for not destroying it. Pirate hackers are very creative in finding security vulnerabilities in automated ships and repair drones, but as often as not these hijackings are in part inside jobs, in which a disloyal employee provides encryption keys. The infrastructure required to communicate with a ship in deep space is also somewhat conspicuous and expensive, meaning that there may be secondary criminal activity necessary to use it illicitly for piracy. However, it is not strictly required; malware planted in maintenance drones or ship control computers in port has also been used.
Hijacking of crewed ships also occurs, when pirate gangs plant their members on commercial ship crews or as passengers. (Usually the fare is fraudulently avoided, or paid with someone else's money.) This is risky and brutal business, of course; passengers are expected to be unarmed and a couple of pirate infiltrators, unless they manage to hack the small arms locker and thereby obtain a monopoly on any weapon more dangerous than a kitchen knife, are likely to have to resort to really dastardly means to take over, which will not leave them with any hostage non-pirate crewmembers to ransom. The threat to life, combined with greater risk, makes hijacking of crewed ships rare, where pirates are concerned.