Ulf Härnhammar from the Debian Security Audit Project discovered a buffer overflow in axel, a light download accelerator. When reading remote input the program did not check if a part of the input can overflow a buffer and maybe trigger the execution of arbitrary code.
For the stable distribution (woody) this problem has been fixed in version 1.0a-1woody1.
For the unstable distribution (sid) this problem has been fixed in version 1.0b-1.
We recommend that you upgrade your axel package.
MD5 checksums of the listed files are available in the original advisory.