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

said the malware research group vx-underground, which says it has the largest collection of malware source codes In a post on X Its data archive amounts to about 30 terabytes.

A Answered by Bernardo QuinteroThe founder of VirusTotal, an online service that scans files for malware across multiple antivirus engines simultaneously, said his service contains 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 are standard 3.5 inch internal hard drives 1 inch in heightwhich 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 are using in this example are exactly 1 TB, because the total usable file capacity on the hard drive is actually somewhat less overall.

Use This online conversion toolApparently, 30 terabytes of vx-underground’s malware data could fill 30 hard drives stacked on top of each other, up to 30 inches tall, or about 2.5 feet.

For reference, this reporter is 6 feet tall. (See figure below, and yes, terrible obbI 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 Towers.