The Document Object Model (DOM) is a programming interface that represents the structure of a webpage as a tree of objects. Each element, attribute, and piece of text in an HTML or XML document becomes a node in this tree. Scripts, such as JavaScript, use the DOM to dynamically access and modify the content, structure, and style of a website after it has loaded. This makes the DOM essential for interactive web applications. However, because the DOM can be manipulated by scripts and browser extensions, it is also a target for cyberattacks, such as DOM-based cross-site scripting (XSS), where attackers inject malicious scripts to alter the webpage’s behavior or steal sensitive data.