Wyze Mesh Router & Firedome

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I received the email below from Wyze that says Firedome has discontinued all services and will shut down its entire company imminently. I did not find any news or info on Firedome’s website (https://firedome.io/) that it was shutting down. They recently secured a $10 million Series A funding round, which suggests they have plans for growth and expansion (Firedome Raises $10M Series A for Its IoT Cybersecurity Solutions | Built In NYC).

I did not find any info on this forum either. Is this a legitimate email from Wyze or was it a spoof? How does the services of Firedome and Cloudflare compare?

Thanks for any response on this!

=============Email from Wyze===============
Dear Mesh Router owner,

We recently learned some disappointing news from our partner, Firedome, whose technology powers the malicious site blocking service on your Wyze Mesh Router. Firedome has discontinued all services and will shut down its entire company imminently. After extensive testing, we have ensured that there will not be any error messages or other effects to your device, but your Mesh Router will no longer prevent devices on your network from visiting malicious websites.

We apologize for this sudden and unexpected change in your router’s feature set. We do have a solution that will re-enable malicious site blocking and could provide an upgrade if you want to also block adult content for your entire network:

The “1.1.1.1 for Families” service from Cloudflare can be enabled on your router by using your router’s custom DNS feature. It’s a free service and is provided by a well-known network technology firm, Cloudflare. By following the steps at the links below, you can instruct your router to hand out these special DNS server addresses to all the devices on your network so that malicious websites will be blocked once again. As an optional (still free) upgrade, you can instead choose a different set of custom DNS servers that will block adult content as well as malicious sites.

Here’s the Wyze support article that shows you how to set up custom DNS for any DNS servers you would like:

[https://support.wyze.com/hc/en-us/articles/20432880436635-How-to-use-custom-DNS-servers-with-Wyze-Mesh-Router]

And here’s the Cloudflare blog article that tells you the specific values for their DNS servers that can block malware and adult content:

[Introducing 1.1.1.1 for Families]

Please contact our support team for any questions about how to configure custom DNS or other concerns: [Contact Us – Wyze Labs, Inc.]

Sincerely,

Your friends at Wyze

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I questioned it as well. The answer is yes, they are basically shutting down and Bankrupt.

I found the following: https://finder.startupnationcentral.org/company_page/firedome

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Good question. When I got the email I did my advanced sleuthing, and I can confirm that it is real/legit. I can summarize all the information I collected for you:

That was just in 1 round (I think it was round 1?). I believe they have had 4-5 rounds now and have actually secured over $14Billion in total. They were supposed to have a new round of funding within the last month, but it fell through when their primary investor pulled out and they went bankrupt because they were operating on debt with no cash reserves or treasury so they announced they were filing for insolvency (either last week of June or first week of July) and then finally filed the court paperwork for it since they couldn’t pay employees’ salaries or their invoices to suppliers and services which were past due (over $4Billion in Debts owed and not payable).

That’s because you were searching in English. All the news about this has primarily been published in Hebrew since they are primarily an Israeli company. :wink:

It’s too bad because they had some REALLY great innovative IoT security projects they were working on that sounded pretty exciting that will now be canceled. They said the new Industrial project wasn’t complete enough at this point to be able to launch it early and save them. It’s a shame they weren’t very good with their finances because some of their ideas and things they were working on were pretty brilliant.

Hope that helps to clarify :+1: You have to search in Israeli news in Hebrew to find anything about them. They are named fairdom or fairdome in Israel and Firedome in the US, if you do try to search for it.

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Impressive sleuthing. You should work on a cure for cancer.

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Thank you for the informative response! I still wonder how the services of Firedome and Cloudflare compare? Does Cloudflare provide the same level of protection? Or is my home network now unprotected from malware?

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I agree with that. Is this just a patch, a step forward or backwards? Is this the final solution? Why was Cloudflare not used to begin with? No confidence yet!

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Thank you for the information. I had the very same question, as to whether the email was real or not, and had looked at the Forum and found nothing. Do you think this is an adequate “patch”?

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I have decided to use an Asus router instead of Wyze. There were no answers to my question on the Wyze router security so I have to assume that it does not block malicious sites anymore. It is not clear to me that Cloudflare is adequate. Time to move on.

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I don’t know that any single service is. :man_shrugging:

At least being able to set a custom DNS is an option. I used to use OpenDNS but for several years have had good results with Quad9. I like having options.

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I used opendns for so long! It was so awesome!

Personally, I don’t think losing Firedome is that big of a deal. In theory, fire dome could be superior sense it has the potential for device level protection. Behavior analysis, etc. But I don’t think we ever got any access to any of those special advanced features. I think for the most part, for us, fire dome was basically just a block list on these routers wise, because wyze kept all the settings pretty basic. Using something like cloudflare DNS will provide Network wide protection, privacy (since all DNS queries are encrypted and kept from ISP manipulation), and speed.

In all, since we didn’t really get device level stuff with wyze’s implementation of fire dome, I really don’t think there’s a huge difference. It feels like both options will just act like a block list anyway.

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I actually use the Cloudflare family side. 1.1.1.3 and 1.0.0.3. I also connect to the Cloudflare Secure DNS for family as well.

it does a great job blocking things when browsing around. However, I did like to know that something internal or external was blocked.

I am not 100% sure, but I don’t think Cloudflare works like firedome did, but it is a great option.

I also use the TPLink Mesh System and have turned on the Security+ and find that to be more integrated and will let me know when there seems to be something trying to get in or a device is acting oddly, like malware.

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I also received the email and set up the recommended Cloudflare DNS. How do I do the same for IPv6? Per Cloudflare’s website:
For IPv6 use:

Malware Blocking Only
Primary DNS: 2606:4700:4700::1112
Secondary DNS: 2606:4700:4700::1002

Malware and Adult Content
Primary DNS: 2606:4700:4700::1113
Secondary DNS: 2606:4700:4700::1003

However, I cannot locate in the Wyze app anywhere to update the IPv6 DNS to the above settings.

Thank you!

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Is there any need for ipv6? I understand why it came about, but I disabled ipv6 years ago. Just technically curious.

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my router is behind xfinity modem/router. I Have xfinity in modem only. would changing DNS make any difference?

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I think more detail to your question might be helpful. In general, the difference would be that devices on your LAN would get the results of their DNS lookups from a different source, and this has the potential to affect performance when your devices reach out to the Internet. By that I mean that every device attaching to and receiving its LAN IP address from your router would receive its lookup information from whatever source you set as your router’s DNS provider…as a general rule. There could be exceptions: It’s usually easy to configure a PC to use a different DNS address (usually more than one) than what your router provides, and it’s even possible to configure yet (another) different DNS address(es) within some Web browsers and other applications.

What kind of difference are you asking about?

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A suggestion I need to make…

If you have Xfinity, you should know that they are currently allowed to legally spy on everything you do. They can log every place you go online and use that data anyway it wants (including sell your data to other companies’ advertising platforms with a user profile, etc), and they reportedly do so. They also use this information to “Throttle” your internet experience so they can effectively blackmail other companies into paying them more money to get higher bandwidth access from their customers.

You can overcome a lot of this legalized nonsense by changing the DNS provider away from Xfinity’s DNS, but there are a couple of caveats:

  1. Xfinity doesn’t ALLOW you to specify a different DNS server in most of their stock gateway models that the majority of people use. This ensures they can continue their seemingly mobbish behavior.
  2. You can manually set DNS on your computer or local machines that are supposed to trump upstream devices, but it has been found that Xfinity tries to hijack the DNS by redirecting requests on standard ports through their own servers for “Security” but in reality they are allegedly selling the data they collect from users because it is legal for them to do so since at least 2017. In some cases, this DNS hijacking is breaking connectivity for people using programs that rely on things like SRV lookups for VOIP services and causing failure of provisioning of phones, and updating settings, etc.
  3. I have read that it is possible to prevent Xfinity’s nonsense, but you would have to turn off “SecurityEdge” and it’s recommended to use DNS over HTTPS so they can’t intercept it…because if they can, they will intercept and redirect it. Use encrypted DNS so they stop messing with your internet traffic and tracking everything you do.

My suggestions:

  1. NEVER use an Xfinity Gateway if you can help it. They use it to do a bunch of weird cloak and dagger stuff, and they never work as well as having your own modem where you can set your own encrypted DNS server they can’t intercept and mess with.
  2. If you’re determined to use an Xfinity Gateway, put it in Bridge Mode, which also disables their “SecurityEdge” tool and allows a personal router to handle everything instead (note, don’t connect devices directly to the gateway when it’s in bridge mode…just another router that will have it’s own firewall and security protections)

Lastly, I will say that when I had Xfinity, I noticed a SIGNIFICANT improvement when I switched from their stock gateway to buy my own modem and changed the DNS to something they couldn’t hijack and redirect.

So my answer is, Yes, I highly recommend changing the DNS to anything that is not run by Xfinity. When I did so, my internet experience improved dramatically.

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:+1:

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