The Data Tower: What a Surfeit of Malware Says About Our Times The news that malware research groups are sitting on massive datasets, dwarfing even the world's most iconic structures, is both a symptom and a cause of our era's peculiarities.
These collections – 30 terabytes for vx underground, 31 petabytes for VirusTotal – illustrate the digital age's defining characteristics: its boundless appetite for information, its propensity for chaos, and its reliance on fragile infrastructure.
When we visualize these datasets as towering stacks of hard drives, we're forced to confront the nature of our digital reality.