This is what some of the world’s largest malware banks look like, stacked like hard drives

Malware research group vx-underground, which claims to have the largest collection of malware source code, said in a post on X that its data file amounts to about 30 terabytes.

TO response from Bernardo Quinterofounder of VirusTotal, an online service that scans files for malware in multiple antivirus engines at once, said his service has about 31 petabytes of malware samples that users have contributed to date. (A petabyte is ~1000 times larger than a terabyte.)

In both cases, there is a lot of data. In context, cybersecurity companies, AI researchers, and threat intelligence companies see repositories like these as critical for training detection models and understanding how attacks evolve. But this made us wonder: what would these huge data sets mean? in fact Do they look like they are stacked like hard drives on top of each other and next to each other? And how would they compare to, say, the Eiffel Tower?

Someone in our newsroom asked an AI chatbot this question and it responded incredibly poorly.

Instead, we did some rough calculations to estimate how tall these databanks would be. Since vx-underground and VirusTotal have “approximately” that amount of data each, “approximately” is enough for us in this case.

Let’s say we are using internal hard drives of 1 terabyte capacity, as they are generally designed to be the same physical size and fit inside any computer. These standardized 3.5-inch internal hard drives are 1 inch tallWhich in order to stack one on top of the other is really what we want to know here.

We also assume that the hard drives we use in this example are exactly 1 terabyte, because in reality the total usable file capacity of a hard drive is generally somewhat less.

Wearing this online conversion toolIt appears that vx-underground’s 30 terabytes of malware data could fill 30 hard drives stacked on top of each other, reaching 30 inches, or about 2.5 feet high.

For reference, this reporter is 6 feet tall. (See image below, and yes, terrible obsecI know.)

Using that same logic, the 31 petabytes of data sent by VirusTotal would fill 31,744 hard drives, which stacked on top of each other would reach approximately 2,645 feet.

The world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, is slightly taller at 2,722 feet.

The Eiffel Tower is 1,083 feet tall. By that logic, VirusTotal has about two and a half Eiffel Towers worth of data.