Data leak at Abu Dhabi finance summit exposes global figures, FT reports
FILE PHOTO: Silhouettes of laptop users are seen next to a screen projection of binary code are seen in this picture illustration created on March 28, 2018. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
Feb 17 : 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 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 Abu Dhabi Finance Week (ADFW), a state-sponsored event that hosted more than 35,000 attendees in December.
Cameron, Howard, and U.S. investor and former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci were among those whose identity documents were exposed, the FT said.
Howard declined to comment, while Cameron and 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 Monday, 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.
