This is what some of the world’s biggest banks of malware look like installed as hard drives

The anti-malware research team vx-monsinsi, which claims to have the largest collection of malware of its kind, said in the post on X that its data base is about 30 terabytes.

A answered Bernardo QuinteroThe founder of VirusTotal, an online service that checks for malware files on multiple antivirus engines at once, said his work has about 31. petabytes of examples of malware that users have contributed to date. (A petabyte is ~1,000x larger than a terabyte.)

In both cases, that’s a lot of data. In his words, cybersecurity companies, AI researchers, and risk companies see databases like this as important for training models to detect and understand how attacks start. But this made us wonder: What can these large datasets do? actually looks like they are stacked like hard drives one on top of the other and side by side? And how does it compare to, say, the Eiffel Tower?

Someone in our newsroom asked an AI chatbot question, and it went horribly wrong.

Instead, we did some back-calculations to determine the length of these data banks. Since vx-underground and VirusTotal both have “about” information for each type, “about” is fine for us in this case.

Let’s say we are using 1 terabyte internal hard drives, because they are usually made to be the same size to fit any computer. This standard 3.5-inch hard drive is 1 inch longWhat we want to know here is to put one over the other.

We also assume that the hard drives we are using in this example are exactly 1 terabyte, because in reality the number of files that can be used on the hard drive is usually limited.

Usage This tool is online conversionit looks like vx-underground’s 30 terabytes of criminal data could fill 30 hard drives stacked on top of each other, up to 30 inches, or about 2.5 feet long.

In fact, this reporter is 6 feet tall. (See the photo below, and yes, it’s ugly obsecI know.)

By the same logic, VirusTotal’s 31 petabytes of uploaded data would have filled 31,744 hard drives, stacked on top of each other for an average of 2,645 feet.

The tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, is a little over 2,722 feet tall.

The Eiffel Tower is 1,083 meters tall. With that in mind, VirusTotal has about two and a half times the Eiffel Tower’s data.