That is what among the world’s largest banks of malware appear like stacked as arduous drives

Malware analysis group vx-underground, which says it has the most important assortment of malware supply code, mentioned in a put up on X that its archive of knowledge quantities to about 30 terabytes.

A reply by Bernardo Quintero, founding father of VirusTotal, a web based service that scans information for malware throughout a number of antivirus engines directly, mentioned his service has about 31 petabytes of malware samples that customers have contributed to this point. (A petabyte is ~1,000x bigger than a terabyte.)

In each instances, that’s a whole lot of knowledge. For context, cybersecurity firms, AI researchers, and risk intelligence corporations deal with repositories like these as important for coaching detection fashions and understanding how assaults evolve. However this had us questioning: What would these huge datasets really appear like stacked as arduous drives one on prime of the opposite and aspect by aspect? And the way would they examine to, say, the Eiffel Tower?

Somebody in our newsroom requested an AI chatbot this query, and it received it extremely fallacious.

As an alternative, we did some tough back-of-a-napkin math to determine how tall these knowledge banks could be. Since vx-underground and VirusTotal each have “about” that a lot knowledge every, “about” is nice sufficient for us on this case. 

Let’s say we’re utilizing 1 terabyte capability inside arduous drives, since these are typically designed to be the identical bodily measurement to suit inside any pc. These standardized 3.5-inch inside arduous drives are 1 inch in peak, which for the sake of stacking one on prime of the opposite is de facto what we wish to know right here.

We’re additionally assuming that the arduous drives we’re utilizing on this instance are precisely 1 terabyte, as a result of in actuality the entire usable file capability of a tough drive is mostly considerably much less. 

Utilizing this on-line conversion device, it appears to be like like vx-underground’s 30 terabytes of malware knowledge might fill 30 arduous drives stacked on prime of each other, reaching 30 inches, or about 2.5 ft tall.

For reference, this reporter is 6 ft tall. (See visible under, and sure, horrible opsec, I do know.)

With that very same logic, VirusTotal’s 31 petabytes of submitted knowledge would fill 31,744 arduous drives, which stacked on prime of each other would attain about 2,645 ft.

The world’s tallest constructing, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, is barely taller at 2,722 ft.

The Eiffel Tower is 1,083 ft tall. By that logic, VirusTotal has about two and a half Eiffel Towers’ price of knowledge.