There are tonnes of really cheap android tablets out there you can get on Black Friday.  Most of them from manufacturers you have never heard of or at least not making Android tablets. This should be clue number one.

In a post on bluebox.com,  Andrew Blaich writes that many of the cheap tablets they tested had minor to Major security flaws.  Flaws that might make you not bother with trying to save an extra $20. Bluebox bought a number of tablets from big name retailers like Best Buy, Walmart, Target, Kmart, Kohl’s and Staple and ran security tests on them. One device from The DigiLand had so many discrepancies and never-encountered-before security issues.  Check out the following quote from Bluebox:

Best Buy is advertising a DigiLand 7” Android tablet for $49.99 We purchased and tested this tablet model, which, reportedly runs Android version 4.4.0. But when we looked under the hood, we started seeing some discrepancies with some parts of the system indicating it’s Android 4.4.2. This makes us question if what the device tells us is real and or not. We also found the device was signed by the AOSP (Android Open Source Project) test key, which is not supposed to be used for signing the firmware of commercial devices because it allows an attacker to easily create a Trojan system update.

You can read more from the link I provided above, but here is a short list of devices you should stay away from, or make sure you rebuild the OS if you know what you are doing.

• $49.99 DigiLand from Best Buy
• $39.99 RCA Mercury from Target
• $39.99 Mach Speed Xtreme from Kmart
• $49.99 Polaroid from Walgreens
• $49.99 Zeki from Kohl’s
• $39.99 Mach Speed JLab Pro from Staples
• $49.99 Craig 7 from Fred’s Super Dollar
• $49.99 Pioneer 7 from Walmart
• $49.00 Nextbook from Walmart
• $49.99 Ematic from Walmart
• $69.99 RCA from Walmart
• $47.32 Worryfree Zeepad from Walmart

And here is the chart that is on their site.  Again, remember, you get what you pay for.  If you buy of one of these cheap devices just to play games or watch movies that might be fine, but I would not even log into a website on one of these. Also, you may want to create a new google email address just to be safe.

Click image to see full size.