Somehow, the New Jersey/Brooklyn Nets never owned the Nets.com web domain. (It's surprising, in this era, but it happens.) Until recently, if you tried to go to nets.com, you were redirected to CyberMesa.com, the website for "a telecommunications company with headquarters in Santa Fe, New Mexico." For information on the professional basketball team with headquarters in East Rutherford, New Jersey, you'd have to type in NJNets.com, which would redirect you to the team's page on the NBA's website.
Early this week, though, Nets.com stopped redirecting to CyberMesa.com. This screencap from LarryBrownSports shows what nets.com looked like on Tuesday:
Yes, that's Mark Cuban's face in the lower left. The Russian text on the bottom reads, "Mikhail, have you noticed? Vilena wondered…" According to Complex, Vilena was the name of one of the prostitutes Prokhorov allegedly hired for a 2007 party at a French ski resort. He was arrested but the charges were later dropped.
This led The Basketball Jones to believe it was the work of someone who followed the Prokhorov scandal closely—a Russian hacker, they speculated.
Today, Nets.com redirects to a page to buy Dallas Mavericks tickets.
Mark Cuban knows a thing or two about the internet, having made billions in online media. He also has a pretty public feud with Mikhail Prokhorov. So is Cuban behind all this? No. Cyber Mesa still owns Nets.com, and retains its license through 2014.
I called Cyber Mesa, hoping to get to the bottom of this. I explained the situation to the woman who answered. She seemed befuddled and put me on hold. I was then transferred to a woman named Jen. I told Jen that there was a lot of speculation on the internet about who was responsible. "They're welcome to speculate," she said. "It's more fun that way."