Abu Dhabi Finance Week Data Breach Exposes Passports of World Leaders and Billionaires

Passport Data Left Wide Open

Passports and identity documents belonging to more than seven hundred attendees of Abu Dhabi Finance Week have been found sitting on an unprotected cloud storage server, accessible to anyone with a standard web browser. The breach was discovered by freelance security researcher Roni Suchowski and reported by the Financial Times on Tuesday.

High-Profile Victims

Among those whose sensitive documents were exposed are Lord David Cameron, the former British Prime Minister; Alan Howard, the billionaire co-founder of hedge fund Brevan Howard; and Anthony Scaramucci, the American investor and former White House communications director. The state-sponsored event, held in December twenty twenty-five under the patronage of Abu Dhabi's Crown Prince Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, attracted more than thirty-five thousand participants and featured over eight hundred speakers from firms managing more than sixty trillion dollars in assets.

Third-Party Vendor Blamed

Abu Dhabi Global Market, the financial free zone that organises the event, confirmed what it described as a vulnerability in a third-party vendor-managed storage environment affecting a limited subset of attendees. The organisation said the server was secured immediately after being contacted by the Financial Times on Monday, and claimed its initial review indicated that access was limited to the researcher who discovered the issue.

Growing Concerns Over Event Security

The incident highlights a growing tension in the world of high-profile international gatherings: the routine collection of sensitive identity documents for accreditation purposes creates significant data security risks. For attendees of the calibre affected, the exposure of passport data presents potential dangers ranging from identity theft to targeted fraud. The breach comes amid intensifying competition between the UAE and Saudi Arabia to position themselves as premier global business and finance hubs, making security credibility a critical concern for future events.