One open model now sits months behind the American frontier on cyber and biology, and refused nothing it was asked to do. The closed model refused so often the test could not be finished. Months of capability separate them. The gap in restraint is total. Part four of four.
The White House finished its frontier AI framework on 1 August and has published nothing. The threshold is classified. The benchmarks are classified. Whether open weight models are covered at all remains unanswered. Part three of four on governing what cannot be recalled.
Washington is pushing its AI security perimeter deep inside the data centre, targeting Chinese-made components that move data between GPUs. The policy may reduce cyber and espionage risks, but it could also raise costs, slow construction and expose a new weakness in America’s AI race as AI scales.
A critical 9.8‑rated flaw (CVE-2025-40551) in SolarWinds Web Help Desk is under active exploitation, letting unauthenticated attackers execute remote code and prompting urgent patch orders for government and enterprise users worldwide.
Cyber News Centre's cyber update for 6th February 2026: SolarWinds has confirmed active exploitation of a critical vulnerability in its Web Help Desk software, with US authorities ordering federal agencies to patch within three days.
SolarWinds is a major US-based IT management software provider serving more than 300,000 customers worldwide, including government agencies, large corporations, healthcare organizations, and educational institutions across multiple countries including Australia.
Update: A critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-40551, is being actively exploited in SolarWinds' Web Help Desk (WHD) software. The flaw, rated 9.8 in severity, is an untrusted data deserialization issue within the AjaxProxy function that allows a remote, unauthenticated attacker to execute operating system commands on an affected server. SolarWinds addressed the vulnerability on January 28 in Web Help Desk version 2026.1. However, evidence of in-the-wild exploitation prompted the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to add the CVE to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog on February 3.
CISA issued an urgent directive requiring US federal agencies to apply the patch by February 6, a significantly shortened three-day deadline that underscores the seriousness of the threat.
The vulnerability was discovered by researchers at Horizon3.ai, who noted it was easily exploitable. This incident marks the third time in recent years that a Web Help Desk vulnerability has been added to the KEV catalog, highlighting the platform as a consistent target for threat actors seeking to compromise enterprise IT environments and gain privileged access to sensitive networks and data.
Why it Matters: The active exploitation of this critical SolarWinds flaw poses a significant and immediate risk to Australian organizations. Government agencies, corporations, and educational institutions using the popular Web Help Desk software are exposed to complete system takeover.
The unusually short three-day patching deadline from CISA serves as a stark warning for security teams globally; this is not a routine vulnerability. The historical targeting of Web Help Desk for high-impact attacks means that any unpatched system is a prime candidate for compromise. A successful attack could lead to widespread data breaches, ransomware deployment, and persistent access for state-sponsored actors or cybercriminals.
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