The FT, citing documents, said scans of more than 700 passports and state identity cards were discovered on an unprotected cloud storage server linked to Abu Dhabi Finance Week (ADFW), a state-sponsored event held in December 2025 that hosted over 35,000 participants.
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US investor and former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci was also among those affected. Howard declined to comment, while Cameron and Scaramucci did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.
In a statement to Reuters, ADFW said the breach involved “a vulnerability in a third-party vendor-managed storage environment relating to a limited subset of ADFW 2025 attendees.” The organisers added that “the environment was secured immediately upon identification, and our initial review indicates that access activity was limited to the researcher who identified the issue.”
The documents were reportedly accessible to anyone using a basic web browser, according to freelance security researcher Roni Suchowski, who discovered the leak. The server was secured after the FT alerted ADFW on Monday.