This is an update for DSA 556-1 which was intended to fix a denial of service situation in netkit-telnet but didn't. The update for unstable did fix the problem. For completeness below is the original advisory text:
Michal Zalewski discovered a bug in the netkit-telnet server (telnetd) whereby a remote attacker could cause the telnetd process to free an invalid pointer. This causes the telnet server process to crash, leading to a straightforward denial of service (inetd will disable the service if telnetd is crashed repeatedly), or possibly the execution of arbitrary code with the privileges of the telnetd process (by default, the 'telnetd' user).
For the unstable distribution (sid) this problem has been fixed in version 0.17-26.
For the stable distribution (woody) this problem has been fixed in version 0.17-18woody2.
We recommend that you upgrade your netkit-telnet-ssl package.
Upgrade Instructions --------------------
wget url will fetch the file for you dpkg -i file.deb will install the referenced file.
If you are using the apt-get package manager, use the line for sources.list as given below:
apt-get update will update the internal database apt-get upgrade will install corrected packages
You may use an automated update by adding the resources from the footer to the proper configuration.
Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 alias woody --------------------------------