This is what some the world’s largest banks of malware look like stacked as hard drives
Source: TechCrunch
Background
Malware research group vx‑underground, which claims to have the largest collection of malware source code, said in a post on X that its archive amounts to about 30 terabytes.
A reply by Bernardo Quintero, founder of VirusTotal, noted that the service has about 31 petabytes of malware samples contributed by users to date (a petabyte is roughly 1,000 times larger than a terabyte).
Both repositories are massive. Cybersecurity companies, AI researchers, and threat‑intelligence firms treat such collections as critical for training detection models and understanding how attacks evolve.
Estimating the size
To visualize how tall these data banks would be if stacked as hard drives, we assume the use of standard 3.5‑inch internal hard drives with a 1 TB capacity. These drives are 1 inch tall, which makes the calculation straightforward.
- vx‑underground – 30 TB → 30 drives → 30 inches (≈ 2.5 feet).
- VirusTotal – 31 PB → 31 744 drives → 2 645 feet.
Comparisons
| Structure | Height |
|---|---|
| Burj Khalifa (world’s tallest building) | 2 722 ft |
| VirusTotal data stack | 2 645 ft |
| One World Trade Center | 1 792 ft |
| Eiffel Tower | 1 083 ft |
| Zack Whittaker (reporter) | 6 ft |
| vx‑underground data stack | 2.5 ft |
By this logic, VirusTotal’s data would be roughly two‑and‑a‑half Eiffel Towers tall.
Image credit: Zack Whittaker / TechCrunch