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

vx-underground said its malware source-code archive is about 30 terabytes, while VirusTotal reportedly holds about 31 petabytes of contributed malware samples.

The article compared the two repositories by imagining them as stacks of 1-terabyte hard drives and estimating their height.

That size gap highlights how massive malware collections have become and why they matter for security research and detection training.

The piece also used landmark comparisons, like the Burj Khalifa and Eiffel Tower, to make the storage scale easier to grasp.