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 of data amounts to approximately 30 terabytes.
Bernardo Quintero, founder of VirusTotal, an online service that scans files for malware with multiple antivirus engines at once, responded that his service has about 31 petabytes of malware samples provided by users to date. (A petabyte is approximately 1,000 times larger than a terabyte.)
Both cases require large amounts of data. By way of background, cybersecurity companies, AI researchers, and threat intelligence companies value such repositories for training detection models and understanding how attacks evolve. But this made us wonder. What do these huge datasets actually look like when stacked one on top of the other as hard drives, and how do they compare to, say, the Eiffel Tower?
Someone in our newsroom asked an AI chatbot this question, and it got it incredibly wrong.
Instead, I did some rough calculations on the back of a napkin to calculate the height of these databanks. vx-underground and VirusTotal each have “approximately” amount of data, so “approximately” is sufficient in this case.
Let's say you have an internal hard drive with a capacity of 1 terabyte. This is because these hard drives are typically designed to be the same physical size to fit in any computer. These standardized 3.5-inch internal hard drives are 1 inch tall, but what you really want to know here is how tall they are to stack one above the other.
Also, in reality, the total usable file space on your hard drive is slightly less, so this example assumes that the hard drive is exactly 1 terabyte.
Using this online conversion tool, it appears that 30 terabytes of malware data from vx-underground can fill 30 stacked hard drives and reach 30 inches (approximately 2.5 feet) in height.
For reference, this reporter is 6 feet tall. (See visual below. Yes, I know it's terrible opsec.)
By the same logic, the 31 petabytes of data sent by VirusTotal would fill 31,744 hard drives, stacking up to about 2,645 feet.
The world's tallest building, Dubai's Burj Khalifa, is slightly taller at 8,722 feet.
The Eiffel Tower is 1,083 feet tall. By that logic, VirusTotal has about two and a half Eiffel Towers' worth of data.
Image credit: Zack Whittaker / TechCrunch
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