When Best Practices Aren’t Enough: UK Breaches Underscore the Importance of Compromise Assessments

Recent breaches at Colt, Marks & Spencer, and Flutter demonstrate that attackers are exploiting unpatched SharePoint vulnerabilities and abusing legitimate tools and living-off-the-land techniques to exfiltrate data and establish persistence. The report stresses that policies and standard EDR/AV are insufficient on their own and recommends forensic compromise assessments (e.g., using THOR integrated with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint) to detect post-compromise artifacts and validate security posture.