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 valuable 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