A corporate night out at Dave & Busters with all you can eat pizza was specifically not the answer. Try flying 95 employees out to a ski resort and entertaining them with snowboarding, blow-up dolls, briefcases of money and, of all things, mimes. That's what KLIK Team did last February. A few won cars, a few won MacBooks, but when you see the shot of the erection mummy, you'll realize that everyone lost their dignity. Hit the jump for a fairly SFW video and a lightly NSFW gallery.

KLIK Team's practices are illegal under Russian law. So how do they get away with not only doing business, but flaunting it?

Yuri Mashevsky, analyst at Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab explains:

Unfortunately, the Klik group is just one of many such groups operating in Russia, and so far such organizations feel relatively safe. Their actions span not only fake anti-spyware, abuse-proof hosting services, but also a huge number of fake online-shops (which receive money from customers but send them nothing in return). Such groups also trade malware, which is often custom-tailored for their 'clients' needs. As a result, the amount of money earned by such criminal groups is stunning.

"We can't decipher it," says Joerg Ziercke, President of the BKA, Germany's Federal Police Office. "That's why we're talking about source telecommunication surveillance — that is, getting to the source before encryption or after it's been decrypted." He does not, however, advocate that the Talinn-based internet company gave law enforcers its encryption keys.

"There are no discussions with Skype," he continued, stating that he had no interest in harming a company's competitiveness. "I don't think that any provider would go for that." He did, however, express the need for his country's law enforcement agencies to be able to conduct online searches of suspects' hard drives using Trojan Horse spyware, but he stressed that these cases were rare.

"We currently have 230 proceedings related to suspected Islamists," Ziercke said. "I can imagine that in two or three of those we would like to do this." [i4u and VoIP News]

Dell's reasoning is this: most people want anti-virus built in, Acrobat Reader doesn't count as trialware (it's free), and Google tools is fine because it's from Google. You do have the option of declining the EULA for the antivirus on first boot to have it automatically uninstall, and Acrobat and Google Tools can be removed using Dell's new uninstall utility.

Although we would have liked for the machine to be completely empty when shipped—we've never had a use for Google Tools, and we like AVG's free antivirus just fine—we can live with this. [Dell]

Well, interestingly enough, the combination of people getting newly purchased, XP Service Pack 2 PCs (or Macs), combined with machines not being turned on for the holidays and people being away from work, made the number of infected PCs decrease dramatically. We wouldn't expect the numbers to stay lower for long, however. Once grandma starts browsing those hardcore porn sites again, she can add her new machine to the bot-net once more. – Jason Chen

Bot-infected PCs get a refresh [Security Focus]

Krucing Off: Who Knows What Evil Lurks in the Heart of Conde s Tech Department? [Gawker]