Fargo Virus (. Fargo Files) — How to Remove?

What is Fargo virus?

Fargo will append its own .FARGO extension to every file’s title. For example, a file named “photo.jpg” will be turned into “photo.jpg.FARGO”. Just like the Excel table named “table.xlsx” will be altered to “table.xlsx.FARGO”, and so forth.

In every folder with the encrypted files, a FILE RECOVERY.txt file will appear. It is a ransom money note. It contains information on the ways of paying the ransom and some other remarks. The ransom note most probably contains instructions on how to buy the decryption tool from the racketeers. That is it.

In the picture below, you can see what a directory with files encrypted by the Fargo looks like. Each filename has the “.FARGO” extension appended to it.

How did my machine catch Fargo ransomware?

There are currently three most popular methods for malefactors to have the Fargo virus planted in your system. These are email spam, Trojan infiltration and peer networks.

If you access your mailbox and see emails that look like familiar notifications from utility services companies, postal agencies like FedEx, Internet providers, and whatnot, but whose sender is strange to you, be wary of opening those emails. They are very likely to have a viral item enclosed in them. So it is even more dangerous to download any attachments that come with letters like these.

Another thing the hackers might try is a Trojan horse model². A Trojan is a program that gets into your computer disguised as something legal. Imagine, you download an installer for some program you need or an update for some software. But what is unboxed turns out to be a harmful agent that compromises your data. As the installation package can have any name and any icon, you have to make sure that you can trust the resource of the stuff you’re downloading. The optimal thing is to trust the software companies’ official websites.

As for the peer-to-peer networks like BitTorrent or eMule, the threat is that they are even more trust-based than the rest of the Web. You can never know what you download until you get it. Our suggestion is that you use trustworthy resources. Also, it is a good idea to scan the folder containing the downloaded files with the anti-malware utility as soon as the downloading is done.