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

Malware research group vx-underground, which says it has the largest collection of malware source code, said in a post on X that its data file is about 30 terabytes.

A answer by Bernardo Quinterofounder of VirusTotal, an online service that scans files for malware on multiple antivirus engines at once, said his service has about 31 petabytes of user-contributed malware samples to date. (A petabyte is ~1,000x larger than a terabyte.)

Either way, that’s a lot of data. For context, cybersecurity firms, AI researchers and threat intelligence firms view repositories like these as critical to training detection models and understanding how attacks evolve. But that got us wondering: What would these massive data sets do? actually do they look like they are stacked as hard drives on top of each other and next to each other? And how will they compare to, say, the Eiffel Tower?

Someone in our newsroom asked an AI chatbot this question, and it got it incredibly wrong.

Instead, we did some rough math to figure out how tall these databanks would be. Since vx-underground and VirusTotal both have “about” that much data each, “about” is good enough for us in this case.

Let’s say we’re using 1 terabyte internal hard drives, as these are generally designed to be the same physical size to fit in any computer. These standard 3.5 inch internal hard drives are 1 inch in heightwhich for the sake of stacking on top of each other is really what we want to learn here.

We also assume that the hard drives we are using in this example are exactly 1 terabyte, because in reality the total usable hard disk capacity is generally somewhat less.

Using 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 tall.

For reference, this reporter is 6 feet tall. (See visual below, and yes, terrible opsec, I know.)

By the same token, VirusTotal’s 31 petabytes of submitted data would fill 31,744 hard drives, which when stacked on top of each other would reach about 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.