How to Remove Craw Virus and Restore. Craw Files?

What is “Craw”?

Ransomware is a kind of virus that crypted your documents and then forces you to pay for them. Note that DJVU (aka STOP) ransomware family was first revealed and discovered by virus analyst Michael Gillespie">¹.

Craw is basically similar to other representatives of the same family: Nakw, Derp, Coot. It crypted all common file types. Hence, you cannot work with the your documents . Craw adds its own “.craw” extension into all files. For example, the file “video.avi”, will be changed into “video.avi.craw”. As soon as the encryption is successfully accomplished, Craw creates a special text file “_readme.txt” and drop it into all folders that contain the modified files.

This text asking payment is for get files back via decryption key:

The cryptography algorithm used by Craw is AES-556. So, if your documents got encrypted with a specific decryption key, which is totally unique and there are no other copies. The sad reality is that it is impossible to recover the information without the unique key available.

In case if Craw worked in online mode, it is impossible for you to gain access to the AES-556 key. It is stored on a remote server owned by the criminals who promote the Craw virus.

For receiving decryption key the payment should be $980. To obtain the payment details the victims are encouraged by the message to contact the frauds by email (), or via Telegram.

Do not pay for Craw!

_readme.txt file also indicates that the computer owners must get in touch with the Craw representatives during 72 hours starting from the moment of files where crypted. On the condition of getting in touch within 72 hours users will be granted a 50% rebate, thus the ransom amount will be minimized down to $490). However, stay away from paying the ransom!

I certainly recommend that you do not contact these crooks and do not pay. The one of the most real working solution to recover the lost data – just using the available backups, or use STOPDecrypter tool.

The peculiarity of all such viruses apply a similar set of actions for generating the unique decryption key to recover the ciphered data.

Thus, unless the ransomware is still under the stage of development or possesses with some hard-to-track flaws, manually recovering the ciphered data is a thing you can’t really perform. The only solution to prevent the loss of your valuable data is to regularly make backups of your crucial files.

Note that even if you do maintain such backups regularly, they ought to be put into a specific location without loitering, not being connected to your main workstation.

For instance, the backup may be kept on the USB flash drive or some alternative external hard drive storage. Optionally, you may refer to the help of online (cloud) information storage.

Needless to mention, when you maintain your backup data on your common device, it may be similarly ciphered as well as other data.

For this reason, locating the backup on your main PC is surely not a good idea.