Approximately 700 attendees, including former British Prime Minister David Cameron and former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci, had their passport information and other identifying information unintentionally made public by the organizers of one of the largest business and investment summits in the Middle East This article explores discovered private information. . London's Financial Times was the first to report on the incident, claiming that an independent security researcher discovered the private information unprotected on a cloud storage system connected to Abu Dhabi Finance Week (ADFW).

The researcher, identified by the Financial Times as Roni Suchowski, reportedly found the data by using commercial software designed to search cloud services for publicly accessible and unsecured data. ## A Data Treasure Trove?

Suchowski allegedly discovered thousands of other documents related to the ADFW summit on the same server as the passports, ID cards, and other personally identifiable information. The data may have been unprotected and available to the public for at least two months, the researcher told the FT. In addition to Cameron and Scaramucci, other well-known people were impacted, according to an FT analysis of a sample of the compromised documents.

These included EU ambassador to the UAE Lucie Berger, hedge fund billionaire Alan Howard, and Richard Teng, co-CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Binance. Similar to: Increasing Cyberattacks Make Latin America the Riskiest Region After making fruitless attempts to alert the ADFW to the leak, Suchowski revealed it to the Financial Times.

The FT claims that after the media outlet contacted ADFW regarding the problem, they secured the server. According to the FT, "ADFW takes, and has always taken, data protection and platform security extremely seriously, and any breaches of security are also taken with utmost seriousness." "As soon as the problem was discovered, the environment was secured, and our preliminary analysis shows that only the researcher who discovered the problem had access.One of the most important financial gatherings in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is Abu Dhabi Finance Week.

The international financial hub of the emirate, Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM), hosts it every year. ADFW's reputation and stature have rapidly expanded since its launch in 2022.

35,000 people from more than 180 countries attended the 2025 summit, which was sponsored by the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and included representatives from companies that manage more than $62 trillion in assets, or 53% of the world's GDP. ## Incorrect Signal At a time when the emirate is attempting to position itself as a major global financial hub alongside New York, London, and Singapore, the data exposure is a blow to Abu Dhabi's reputation. An economic development initiative, the new FinTech, Insurance, Digital, and Alternative Assets cluster was introduced in the emirate during ADFW.

By 2045, it is expected to boost Abu Dhabi's GDP by $15 billion, and the emirate is aggressively luring foreign investors with assurances of political stability and progressive regulatory oversight.

See also: Dangerous Electric Buses in China Spark Aussie Gov't Review In light of this, the disclosure of private information belonging to billionaires from hedge funds, CEOs of cryptocurrencies, and former heads of state is likely to give prospective investors the wrong impression. "This leak represents a huge failure in operational security, and an embarrassing one," Closed Door Security's chief operations officer (COO), Cassius Edison, stated. "ADFW made a grave mistake by hosting a conference of well-known politicians and business executives without making the bare minimum of arrangements to secure their data."

In an emailed comment, he added, "The conference's credibility could have been completely destroyed if this data had been accessed and stolen by criminals or malicious actors."