What is Stalling | Definition and Meaning

In the context of malware detection, stalling refers to code that delays malicious activity for long enough to avoid automated dynamic analysis, thus resulting in its non-detection, it runs agnostically of the execution environment, but may delay malicious execution for longer in dynamic analysis environments. Improvements to basic wait functions include encrypting the malicious payload with a weak key, the brute force cracking of which will time out the analzyer. This leverages the vulnerability of dynamic analysis in that their execution time is inherently limited by the end user’s patience.