New York Times article about FBI secretly removing malware from U.S. corporate servers - would this indicate they have a government backdoor?

Question

New York times just ran an article titled "U.S. Says It Secretly Removed Malware Worldwide, Pre-empting Russian Cyberattacks" that stated

The United States said on Wednesday that it had secretly removed malware from computer networks around the world in recent weeks, a step to pre-empt Russian cyberattacks and send a message to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia...

...Armed with secret court orders in the United States and the help of governments around the world, the Justice Department and the F.B.I. disconnected the networks from the G.R.U.’s own controllers...

...The court orders allowed the F.B.I. to go into domestic corporate networks and remove the malware, sometimes without the company’s knowledge.

The article refers to removing malware from a network but technically it never resides on a network (the network is always a transmission medium) but rather on a computer somewhere. In this case these computers where located inside domestic corporate networks.

Would this indicate that the U.S. government has the ability to control the binaries installed on privately owned computers "at will", and that they thus have a backdoor to those computers?

Answer 1

Would this indicate that the U.S. government has the ability to control the binaries installed on privately owned computers "at will", and that they thus have a backdoor to those computers?

No. In this specific case they actually took over control servers for the botnet and issued commands to the infected devices, i.e. they hacked the hacker. See Companies were slow to remove Russian spies’ malware, so FBI did it for them for more details.

But there can be other ways too apart from having a government controlled backdoor into all systems. For example they might have used the same vulnerability as the attackers used when they took over the systems.