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

Malware analysis group vx-underground, which says it has the most important assortment of malware supply code, mentioned in a post 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 without delay, mentioned his service has about 31 petabytes of malware samples that customers have contributed to this point. (A petabyte is ~1,000-times bigger than a terabyte.)

In each circumstances, that’s a whole lot of information. For context, cybersecurity corporations, AI researchers, and menace intelligence companies deal with repositories like these as crucial for coaching detection fashions and understanding how assaults evolve. However this had us questioning: What would these huge datasets truly appear like stacked as onerous drives one on prime of the opposite and side-by-side? And the way would they evaluate to, say, the Eiffel Tower?

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

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

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

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

Utilizing this online conversion tool, it appears like vx-underground’s 30 terabytes of malware information may fill 30 onerous 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 information would fill 31,744 onerous drives, which stacked on prime of one 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.