It was discovered that APT, the high level package manager, does not properly invalidate unauthenticated data (CVE-2014-0488), performs incorrect verification of 304 replies (CVE-2014-0487), does not perform the checksum check when the Acquire::GzipIndexes option is used (CVE-2014-0489) and does not properly perform validation for binary packages downloaded by the apt-get download command (CVE-2014-0490).
For the stable distribution (wheezy), these problems have been fixed in version 0.9.7.9+deb7u3.
For the unstable distribution (sid), these problems have been fixed in version 1.0.9.
We recommend that you upgrade your apt packages.
Distributing software efficiently accross your platform can be difficult. Every distribution comes with a package manager which is usually suited for this task. APT can be relied upon on when using Debian or a derivative.
Unfortunately, the official repositories may not contain everything you need. When you require unpackaged software or more recent versions, it is possible to setup your own local repository.
Most of what is presented here was setup for Dailymotion and was greatly inspired by the work done by Raphaël Pinson at Orange.
apt-dater provides an ncurses frontend for managing package updates on a large number of remote hosts using SSH. It supports Debian-based managed hosts as well as rug (e.g. openSUSE) and yum (e.g. CentOS) based systems.
aptly is a swiss army knife for Debian repository management: it allows to mirror remote repositories, take snapshots, pull new versions of packages along with dependencies, publish snapshots.
pip doesn't suck, and neither does apt.