Data leak at Abu Dhabi finance summit exposes global figures, FT reports

Feb 17 (Reuters) – Former British Prime Minister David Cameron and hedge fund billionaire Alan Howard were among the hundreds whose passports and other identification papers were leaked online after they attended an Abu Dhabi conference, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday.

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 the Abu Dhabi Finance Week (ADFW), a state-sponsored event that hosted more than 35,000 people in December.

U.S. investor and former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci was also among those whose identity documents were exposed, the FT said.

Howard declined to comment, while Cameron and Scaramucci did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.

ADFW, in a statement to Reuters, said, “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 who identified the issue,” ADFW added.

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 Monday, the report added.

(Reporting by Bipasha Dey in Bengaluru, additional reporting by Chandni Shah; editing by Jonathan Oatis and Harikrishnan Nair)