- ADFW 2025 exposed more than 700 passport scans and IDs of high-profile attendees
- The leak included documents from David Cameron, Anthony Scaramucci, Alan Howard and Binance’s Richard Teng.
- Poorly configured and secured third-party vendor database after discovery; no evidence of malicious access
Abu Dhabi Finance Week (ADFW) reportedly leaked highly sensitive information about its attendees, including hundreds of high-profile individuals.
Organized by Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) under the patronage of senior UAE leaders, the event is a major financial industry event that brings together global leaders in finance, investment, policy, technology and markets.
But according to a new Financial times According to the report, ADFW maintained a public, passwordless database containing scans of more than 700 passports and state ID cards.
There is no evidence of exploitation
The database was discovered by independent security researcher and consultant Roni Suchowski, and people whose passports were leaked included American investor and former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci, former British Prime Minister David Cameron and hedge fund billionaire Alan Howard.
Other high-profile people mentioned in its report include Richard Teng, co-CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Binance, who is also the former CEO of Abu Dhabi’s ADGM, and Lucie Berger, EU ambassador to the United Arab Emirates.
The report claims that more than 35,000 people participated in the event, which would mean that only a small portion of visitors saw their data leaked. So far, none of the people mentioned in the reports have commented on the leak.
talking to PakGazetteADFW said it addressed “a vulnerability in a third-party vendor-managed storage environment related 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 investigator who identified the issue,” ADFW added. In other words, the hackers did not find the database before the researcher.
Misconfigured databases remain the leading cause of data leaks on the Internet.
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