is an old tablet on wifi a vulnerability?

If you limit it to "Official" sites and have wifi security enabled I don't think it'll be much of a risk.

Are you sure it's locked to Froyo? It should be upgradeable to Gingerbread according to these sites. You may need to use Kies though.
Alternatively you can root the device and flash a custom ROM to make it more modern, in the same sense of installing Windows 7/8/10 on a Windows XP machine.

Anyway, like @Fireflycph said, secure your device and allow only trusted sources. It's not like the things happened in Watch Dogs will happen frequently in real life.

jtn3833 said:

I looked around but couldn't find a thread for this topic, sorry if I missed it...

I recently found my first tablet. A Samsung Galaxy Tab 7 (SCH-I800). It's ancient, one of the first 7 inch tablets, and was quite spiffy when it was released.

My idea was to set it up as a news/ weather station. Just leave it in the charging dock and let it scroll through news & weather updates via wifi. Nothing too spectacular, but I figured it's better than just tossing it.

My concern is that it might make my home network vulnerable. It's limited to Androi 2.2, Froyo, though it does have Avast anti-virus installed.

Your thoughts?
Thanks,
jtn

Click to expand...

For home use I wouldn't bat an eyelid, for a weather station at your desk in a military base, hospital or bank, i'd probably think twice just incase.

You should include your home as an extension of your workplace, if you bring work from the office to work on at home. At lot of times laptops get attacked outside of the secured office network, in a cafe, at home or on vacation somewhere and bring the attackers back to the office where they launch attacks using the compromised laptop as the starting point. That is why Windows Server 2008 and above has Network Access Protection. NAP checks every device that connects to look for updated patches and updated antivirus before letting the device connect to the main network. It's not perfect protection, but you can see how important this is since MS decided to include this feature in Windows Server.