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

The 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 archive amounts to about 30 terabytes.

Bernardo Quintero, founder of VirusTotal, an online service that scans files for malware across multiple antivirus engines simultaneously, said his service has about 31 Petabyte Of the malware samples contributed by users so far. (A petabyte is about 1,000 times larger than a terabyte.)

Either way, that’s a lot of data. For context, cybersecurity companies, AI researchers, and threat intelligence companies treat such repositories as essential for training detection models and understanding how attacks evolve. But this got us wondering: what will these massive data sets do? In reality Look like the hard drives are stacked one on top of the other and side by side? How does it compare to the Eiffel Tower, for example?

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

Instead, we did some rough calculations to figure out how long these data banks are. Since both vx-underground and VirusTotal have a lot of “about” data each, “about” is good enough for us in this case.

Let’s say we’re using 1TB internal hard drives, since they’re generally designed to be the same physical size to fit into any computer. These standard 3.5-inch internal hard drives are 1 inch high, which is what we need to know here in order to stack one on top of the other.

We also assume that the hard drives we are using in this example are exactly 1 TB, because the total usable file capacity on the hard drive is actually somewhat less overall.

Using this online conversion tool, it appears that 30 terabytes of vx-underground malware data could fill 30 hard drives stacked on top of each other, up to 30 inches long, or about 2.5 feet.

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

By the same logic, 31 petabytes of data sent from VirusTotal would fill 31,744 hard drives, which could reach about 2,645 feet if stacked on top of another drive.

The tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, stands at just over 2,722 feet tall.

The Eiffel Tower is 1,083 feet tall. By this logic, VirusTotal has about two and a half as much data as the Eiffel Tower.