Forums are full of contradictory advice on this. Some people say pay the ransom. Others say just run a random decryptor tool you found on a sketchy site. Here's the practical version from someone who deals with STOP/DJVU infections regularly: there is no magic decryptor for modern Foty variants, but you can still recover STOP DJVU foty photos using a layered approach, and the absence of a README file doesn't change that at all.

TL;DR

To recover STOP DJVU foty photos, first confirm the infection by checking for uniform .foty extensions on your files. Then work through backup options (Previous Versions, OneDrive), run Windows File Recovery in extensive mode, and use PhotoRec or dedicated data recovery software for deep scanning. The older the infection, the harder recovery gets, but it's rarely hopeless.

⏰️ 13 min read ✅ 55% success rate (varies by drive usage since infection) 📅 Updated July 2026

Key Takeaways

You don't need a README file to confirm STOP/DJVU Foty ransomware. The uniform .foty extension on every encrypted file is the tell.
Modern Foty variants from 2021 to 2022 are not decryptable without the attacker's private key. Don't waste time hunting for a decryptor that doesn't exist.
Windows File Recovery in extensive mode and PhotoRec are your best free options for raw file recovery.
The longer the drive has been in normal use since the infection, the lower your chances. Stop writing to it now.
Dedicated data recovery software gives you a GUI-based deep scan with image preview, which saves time when sorting through hundreds of recovered fragments.

At a Glance

Difficulty: Advanced
Time Required: 30 to 90 mins depending on drive size
Success Rate: Highly variable. Fresh infections with backups: high. 2021-2022 infections on heavily used drives: lower but not zero.

What Actually Causes the .Foty Extension Problem?

STOP/DJVU is one of the most widespread ransomware families targeting home users, and Foty is one of its many variants. It typically lands on a machine through cracked software downloads, fake Adobe or Windows activators, or dodgy email attachments. Once it runs, it encrypts files and appends a four-letter extension (.foty in this case) to every file it touches. JPEGs become .jpg.foty. PNGs become .png.foty. The original files are gone, replaced with encrypted versions the ransomware created.

The README file (usually named _readme.txt) is dropped in affected folders to tell you how to pay. But it gets deleted, missed, or cleaned up by antivirus software. That's why you might have all the .foty files and no note. It doesn't matter for recovery purposes. The extension itself tells you everything you need to know.

The bigger problem for 2021 to 2022 infections is time. Every time Windows updates, installs a new application, writes a log file, or you copy something to that drive, it potentially overwrites the sectors where your original unencrypted photos used to live. STOP/DJVU doesn't always delete the originals cleanly either, which is actually good news: fragments often survive on disk long after the visible files are gone. But two to three years of normal use is rough on those fragments. Some will be gone. Some won't. The only way to find out is to scan.

There's also the question of whether the ransomware used an online or offline encryption key. No More Ransom's ID tool can help you check, though for Foty variants from this period, online keys are most common. That means no decryption without the attacker cooperating, which they won't. So we focus entirely on recovery from disk.

Recover STOP DJVU Foty Photos: Quick Fix First

Before running any recovery software, check the obvious sources. These take five to ten minutes and occasionally save hours of scanning.

Confirm the Infection and Check Built-In Backups Easy

Make extensions visible
Open File Explorer. Click the View tab, then Options, then Change folder and search options. In the View tab, clear the tick next to 'Hide extensions for known file types' and click Apply. Now browse to your Pictures folder. You're looking for files named like IMG_0001.JPG.foty or holiday2021.png.foty. If every file has that same .foty suffix, that's your confirmation. STOP/DJVU is consistent. It doesn't mix extensions.
Try Restore Previous Versions
Right-click the Pictures folder (or whichever folder held your photos) and click Restore previous versions. If you see any entries with dates before you noticed the problem, select the earliest clean one and click Open first to browse it. Don't click Restore yet until you've confirmed the files inside look right. If they do, then restore to a different folder rather than overwriting in place.
Check OneDrive ransomware recovery
If your photos were synced to OneDrive, this is potentially the fastest fix. Open OneDrive settings from the taskbar icon, go to Help and Settings, then Restore your OneDrive. Pick a date from before the infection appeared and click Restore. OneDrive keeps version history and can roll back the entire library. If this works, you're sorted without any further steps.

If Previous Versions or OneDrive recovery returns your photos intact, you're done. Skip the rest and go straight to the prevention section.

No Previous Versions entries? That means Volume Shadow Copy and File History were either disabled or the ransomware deleted the snapshots (some STOP/DJVU variants do this). Don't panic. Move to the intermediate steps.

Intermediate Recover STOP DJVU Foty Photos Solutions

These are the tools most people end up needing. Windows File Recovery is free and built into Windows 10 and 11. PhotoRec is free and open source. Both work at the raw sector level, meaning they look for photo data on disk regardless of what the file system says is there. For a 2021 or 2022 infection, this is where real recovery happens.

Windows File Recovery (Extensive Mode) Intermediate

Install the tool
Open the Microsoft Store, search for Windows File Recovery, and install it. It's a Microsoft-published command-line tool, free, and safe. Full documentation is available on Microsoft's official docs page.
Open as Administrator
Press the Windows key, type Windows File Recovery, right-click it, and select Run as Administrator. You need admin rights for disk access.
Run the extensive scan
Type this command, replacing C: with your source drive and D: with a different destination drive (ideally an external drive with plenty of space):
winfr C: D: /extensive /n *.jpg /n *.png /n *.jpeg
The /extensive flag does a full sector-by-sector scan. The /n flags filter for common photo formats. Confirm with Y when prompted. For a large drive this can take one to three hours.
Widen the search if needed
Run a second pass adding RAW formats: winfr C: D: /extensive /n *.raw /n *.nef /n *.cr2 /n *.mp4 /n *.mov. If you shot on a DSLR or modern phone, these formats matter. Put results in a new destination subfolder so they don't mix with the first pass.
Check the results
Browse to your destination drive. Recovered files often have generic names like file0001.jpg. Open them to see what's there. Some will be thumbnails, some will be partial images, some will be exactly what you were looking for.

Even partial recoveries are worth keeping. Photo repair tools can sometimes reconstruct partially overwritten JPEGs.

PhotoRec Raw File Carving Intermediate

Download PhotoRec
Get it from the TestDisk project website (it's bundled with TestDisk). It's open source and has been around for years. It's a bit ugly to look at but it works. This is the same tool that professional data recovery labs use as a baseline.
Select your disk and partition
Launch PhotoRec. Use the arrow keys to select the physical disk (not just a partition). Then select the partition that held your photos. Choose the filesystem type: for Windows drives, pick Other (which handles NTFS and FAT).
Set file types
Go into File Opt and deselect everything except JPG, PNG, and any RAW formats relevant to your camera. Narrowing the types speeds things up and reduces junk in the output.
Set output to a different drive
Navigate to a destination on a separate drive, not the one you're scanning. Press C to start. PhotoRec will create numbered folders full of recovered files. When it finishes, sort through them manually. There will be a lot of files, including things from websites and apps, not just your photos.

PhotoRec doesn't recover filenames. Everything comes out with a generic name. This is normal. Sort by file size and date to find your family photos faster.

For a broader look at recovering images and videos from Windows systems in general, our guide on how to recover pictures and videos on Windows covers additional tools and approaches that complement what's covered here.

Dedicated data recovery software gives you a more visual approach than the command line tools above. A good tool will scan the drive, show you thumbnail previews of found images before you recover them, and let you filter by file type and condition. That preview step alone saves a lot of time when you're sifting through hundreds of fragments. Install any such tool on a different drive from the one you're scanning, and always recover to a third drive. Never recover to the source drive.

Advanced Recover STOP DJVU Foty Photos Fixes

If the intermediate steps didn't get everything, or if you want to be thorough before giving up, this is the approach. It takes longer but it's the best-effort strategy for old infections on heavily used drives.

Sector-by-Sector Drive Image and Multi-Tool Recovery Advanced

Stop all writes to the affected drive immediately
Don't install anything, don't copy files to it, don't defragment it. Every write operation potentially destroys recoverable data. If the affected drive is your system drive (C:), consider booting from a USB Linux environment to avoid Windows writing to it during normal operation.
Create a sector-by-sector image
Use a disk imaging tool to create a full bit-for-bit copy of the affected drive to a separate large drive. This gives you a safe copy to run recovery tools against repeatedly without touching the original. Tools like Clonezilla (free) or professional options handle this. The image file will be the full size of the source drive.
Run all three tools against the image
Mount the image as a virtual drive, then run Windows File Recovery, PhotoRec, and your chosen data recovery software against it in sequence. Each tool uses different algorithms and finds different fragments. Running all three gives you the best coverage. Send results to separate destination folders.
Consolidate and deduplicate
Merge all recovered files into one working area. Use a duplicate finder to remove identical copies (you'll get a lot of duplicates across tool passes). Then sort by file size: your family photos will typically be larger than thumbnail fragments or web cache images.
Try System Restore as a last resort
Open Control Panel, System and Security, System, then System Protection. If protection was enabled on your drive before the infection, you may have restore points predating it. Use System Restore to roll back, but only after you've already recovered what you can from the current state. System Restore changes the OS state and can complicate things if done first.

Creating a drive image requires a destination drive at least as large as the source. A 500GB drive needs a 500GB destination. Don't skip this step if the photos are important. It's the only way to run multiple recovery passes safely.

Wondering how recovery holds up on drives that have been sitting unused for years? Our piece on recovering data from a 17-year-old hard drive covers what actually degrades over time and what survives longer than you'd expect.

One more thing worth checking: if you had any cloud storage synced to those folders, even partially, check it now. Google Photos, iCloud, Dropbox, and Amazon Photos all have version history or trash recovery features. The ransomware encrypts local files but may not have touched cloud copies if the sync was paused or the infection happened faster than the sync could upload the encrypted versions. Our guide on how to download photos from cloud storage walks through the recovery options across the main platforms.

Also worth knowing: CISA's StopRansomware resource maintains updated guidance on ransomware families including STOP/DJVU, and occasionally new decryptors or victim support resources appear there first.

Preventing STOP DJVU Foty Photo Loss in Future

The honest prevention advice here isn't complicated, it's just that most people don't do it until after something like this happens.

First priority: offline backups. An external drive that you plug in, back up to, and then unplug is something ransomware physically cannot reach. Weekly backups take ten minutes. Recovering from ransomware takes days. The maths isn't hard. Keep at least two copies on separate drives and store one away from your desk.

Second: turn on File History or OneDrive sync with version history enabled. OneDrive's ransomware recovery feature (the one we covered in the quick fix section) is genuinely useful, but only if sync was running before the infection. Check right now that it's enabled and that your Pictures folder is included in the sync scope.

Third: keep file extensions visible. This one sounds minor but it's not. If you can see .foty appearing on your files the moment it starts, you can pull the network cable and shut down before the ransomware finishes encrypting everything. Most STOP/DJVU infections take several minutes to hours to complete. Catching it early saves the files it hadn't reached yet.

Fourth: don't run cracked software. STOP/DJVU spreads almost exclusively through fake activators, cracked games, and dodgy installers. It's not subtle about this. If you're downloading a keygen for Photoshop, you're playing Russian roulette with your photos. The ransomware authors know exactly where their audience is and they seed those download sites deliberately.

Finally, run daily tasks from a standard Windows user account rather than an Administrator account. Ransomware running under a limited account has a harder time touching system files and shadow copies. It's not a complete defence but it reduces the blast radius significantly. AV-Comparatives publishes regular real-world protection tests that show which security tools actually catch STOP/DJVU variants before they execute. Worth checking before you pick an antivirus.

Recover STOP DJVU Foty Photos: Summary

To recover STOP DJVU foty photos without a README file, start by confirming the infection from the uniform .foty extension pattern, then work through Previous Versions and OneDrive before moving to Windows File Recovery in extensive mode and PhotoRec. For older infections, create a drive image first and run multiple tools against it. Dedicated data recovery software with image preview is worth using alongside the free tools because it finds things the command-line scanners miss. The sooner you stop writing to the affected drive, the better your chances. And once you're through this, set up offline backups so it can't happen again.

Quick Reference

Confirm .foty infection: look for uniform extension on all files in File Explorer with extensions visible
Check Previous Versions, OneDrive, and Windows Backup first (5 to 10 minutes)
Run winfr C: D: /extensive /n *.jpg /n *.png for free deep scanning
Use PhotoRec for raw carving alongside Windows File Recovery
Image the drive before running multiple recovery tools if photos are critical
Stop all writes to the affected drive immediately and don't reinstall Windows onto it