This is what some of the world’s largest banks of malware look like stacked as hard drives
Source: TechCrunch
Malware research group vx‑underground, which claims to have the largest collection of malware source code, posted that its archive amounts to about 30 TB of data【https://x.com/vxunderground/status/2051305793614385552】.
A reply from Bernardo Quintero, founder of VirusTotal, noted that the service has about 31 PB of malware samples contributed by users to date【https://x.com/bquintero/status/2051675228678365614】 (1 PB ≈ 1 000 TB).
Both repositories are massive and are used by cybersecurity firms, AI researchers, and threat‑intelligence teams for training detection models and studying attack evolution.
Visualizing the data as stacked hard drives
Assumptions
- Use standard 3.5‑inch internal hard drives, each 1 TB capacity.
- Each drive is 1 inch tall【https://darwinsdata.com/what-are-the-dimensions-of-a-3-5-hard-drive/】.
- Drives are exactly 1 TB for simplicity (real‑world usable capacity is slightly lower).
vx‑underground
30 TB ÷ 1 TB per drive = 30 drives → 30 inches (≈ 2.5 ft) tall.
VirusTotal
31 PB = 31 000 TB.
31 000 TB ÷ 1 TB per drive = 31 000 drives.
31 000 inches ÷ 12 = 2 645 ft tall.
Height comparisons
| Structure | Height |
|---|---|
| Burj Khalifa (world’s tallest building) | 2 722 ft |
| VirusTotal (stacked drives) | 2 645 ft |
| One World Trade Center | 1 792 ft |
| Eiffel Tower | 1 083 ft |
| Zack Whittaker (reporter, 6 ft) | 6 ft |
| vx‑underground (stacked drives) | 2.5 ft |
By this logic, VirusTotal’s data would be roughly two and a half Eiffel Towers tall.
Image credit: Zack Whittaker / TechCrunch