14 DAY TRIAL // The Debian Project announced today the general availability of the seventh point release in the Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" operating system series to address the recently discovered APT security vulnerability.
A security vulnerability affects the APT package manager on Debian GNU/Linux and Ubuntu, as well as other derivatives from the two, allowing a remote attacker to install malicious packages users' machines. APT considered the packages as valid, thus allowing the attacker to execute code as root and possibly crash the host.
Both Debian and Ubuntu released patched versions of APT in their supported distributions, but the Debian Project also respined their installation and live images by releasing the Debian GNU/Linux 9.7 "Stretch" point release to avoid any complications in new deployments of their operating system.
"The Debian project is pleased to announce the seventh update of its stable distribution Debian 9 (codename stretch). This point release incorporates the recent security update for APT, in order to help ensure that new installations of stretch are not vulnerable. No other updates are included," reads the release announcement.
Debian GNU/Linux 9.7 "Stretch" ISO images are coming soon
As with any point release of the Debian GNU/Linux operating system, there's no need to download new ISO images to update your existing installations, especially not this time as the Debian GNU/Linux 9.7 "Stretch" release only contains a new version of the APT package manager that's no longer vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks.
However, the Debian Project will release live and install-only ISO images for all supported architectures of the Debian GNU/Linux 9.7 "Stretch," which will be available for download in the coming days. We'll let you know when that happens, and, in the meantime, make sure you update your installations by running the next commands.
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade