Chances are if you have an email account, then you have received spam messages. Simply put, spam messages are unsolicited emails that attempt to profit off innocent Internet users. Some spam messages are relatively harmless and simply try to entice you to buy items that you don’t need or that don’t work, but other spam messages can be malicious and contain viruses and other malicious programs.

Put simply, a phishing scam is an attempt by a scammer to trick a victim into divulging sensitive information. While these scams seem simple and easy to thwart, they are actually the top cause of information security breaches and identify theft crimes.