HMM: U.S. says it secretly removed malware worldwide, preempting Russian cyberattacks.

The move, made public by Attorney General Merrick Garland, comes as U.S. officials warn that Russia could try to strike American critical infrastructure — including financial firms, pipelines and the electric grid — in response to the crushing sanctions that the United States has imposed on Moscow over the war in Ukraine.

The malware enabled the Russians to create “botnets” — networks of private computers that are infected with malicious software and controlled by the GRU, the intelligence arm of the Russian military. But it is unclear what the malware was intended to do, since it could be used for everything from surveillance to destructive attacks.

A U.S. official said Wednesday that the United States did not want to wait to find out. Armed with secret court orders in the United States and the help of governments around the world, the Justice Department and the FBI disconnected the networks from the GRU’s own controllers.

“Fortunately, we were able to disrupt this botnet before it could be used,” Garland said.

Well, good.

But: “The court orders allowed the FBI to go into domestic corporate networks and remove the malware, sometimes without the company’s knowledge.”