Data leak at Abu Dhabi finance summit exposes global figures, FT reports
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Attendees at the Abu Dhabi flagship investment conference included former British prime minister David Cameron and hedge fund billionaire Alan Howard.
PHOTO: ADOBE STOCK
- Hundreds of attendees' passports and ID documents, including David Cameron's, were exposed online from Abu Dhabi Finance Week's unprotected cloud storage server.
- Scans of over 700 passports and state ID cards were accessible to anyone via a web browser, discovered by security researcher Roni Suchowski.
- ADFW confirmed a third-party vendor vulnerability, securing the server immediately after the Financial Times reported the security lapse.
AI generated
LONDON - Passports and other ID documents of hundreds of attendees of Abu Dhabi’s flagship investment conference, including former British prime minister David Cameron and hedge fund billionaire Alan Howard, were exposed online, the Financial Times reported on Feb 17.
The FT, citing documents, said scans of more than 700 passports and state identity cards were discovered on an unprotected cloud storage server associated with Abu Dhabi Finance Week (ADFW), a state-sponsored event that hosted more than 35,000 attendees in December.
Mr Cameron, Mr Howard, and US investor and former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci were among those whose identity documents were exposed, the FT said.
Mr Howard declined to comment, while Mr Cameron and Mr Scaramucci did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Abu Dhabi Global Market, which organises ADFW, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The data was accessible to anybody using a simple web browser, the FT reported, citing freelance security researcher and consultant Roni Suchowski, who discovered it.
The server was made secure after the FT approached ADFW about the leak on Feb 16, the report added.
ADFW confirmed in a statement to FT “a vulnerability in a third-party vendor-managed storage environment relating to a limited subset of ADFW 2025 attendees”.
“The environment was secured immediately upon identification, and our initial review indicates that access activity was limited to the researcher that identified the issue,” ADFW told FT. REUTERS
