• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, September 5, 2006

Spam appears to be on the rise, at least according to software company Ipswitch.

The company reported late last week that 70 percent of email received in North America and Europe during the second quarter was spam--up from 62 percent in the first quarter and 57 percent during the holiday season.

What do spammers hawk? The single largest proportion of unsolicited commercial e-mail--36 percent-- touted medications; in the first quarter, just 17 percent of spam messages were for pharmaceuticals, according to Ipswitch.

Porn accounted for 14 percent of spam last quarter, down from 24 percent in the first three months of the year. Messages offering electronics or pirated software totaled 10 percent of spam last quarter, compared to 16 percent the quarter before, while e-mails related to mortgages constituted 9 percent of spam last quarter--down from 14 percent in the first.

Ipswitch also found that fraudulent "phishing" e-mails, or attempts to trick Web users into revealing their social security numbers, bank account information or other similar material, came to 19 percent of all spam--propelling phishing messages into the second most popular category of spam. Last quarter, finance-related phishing emails didn't even make the top 5, according to Ipswitch.