Yesterday I received an email from PayPal, asking for a verification of my account ("Click here to....").

Various things triggered an alert in my mind, not the least of which is that I've never, ever used PayPal, and that even if I did, I most certainly wouldn't be doing it from work (which is where the email was sent).

Being somewhat familiar with things networkable, I did a whois lookup at ARIN.net on the IP (which I got from the email header). Well, imagine my surprise when I found that it was registered to a Royal Signals establishment in the UK!

Golly, I said to myself, could this be an attempt to worm financial information out of me?

So I reported the whole this to PayPal (the real one). And yes, I included the header in my report. Wouldn't do much good without it.

My rule: Be suspicious of everything and everyone that wants your financial data or, in fact, ANY data about you.