Geoff Mcdonald
Principal Research Group Manager Microsoft Defender For Endpoint
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolGeoff Mcdonald is a Principal Research Group Manager at Microsoft Defender for Endpoint with 13 years of experience blending data science, machine learning, and hands-on malware research to protect billions of devices. He leads multidisciplinary teams that design ML pipelines and automated protection features, translating deep reverse-engineering and threat-hunting experience into scalable defenses. His background spans Symantec threat analysis to long‑running security research roles at Microsoft, giving him rare visibility into both offensive malware techniques and production-grade detection engineering. An active practitioner, he contributes open-source tooling—most notably enhancements to a Windows process-dump tool that improves memory-based PE extraction and entry-point recovery—demonstrating a knack for practical tooling that bridges research and incident response. Based in Vancouver, he pairs an electrical engineering foundation with advanced control systems training to approach security problems analytically and at scale.
13 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
MSc, Electrical Engineering; Advanced Control Systems Lab, MSc, Electrical Engineering; Advanced Control Systems Lab at University of AlbertaBSc, Electrical Engineering with Internship, BSc, Electrical Engineering with Internship at The University of Calgary
Stackoverflow
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Github Skills (13)
memory-management10
memory-model10
memory-allocation10
c-language10
ws-api10
cprogramming-language10
reverse-engineering10
winapi10
wp-api10
multithreading9
debug9
debugging9
security8
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
glmcdona/Process-Dump
Nov 2015 - Sep 2022
Windows tool for dumping malware PE files from memory back to disk for analysis.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:3 reviews, 67 commits, 19 PRs in 6 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Geoff made significant contributions to `process-dump`, primarily focusing on enhancing its functionality and stability. These updates include the addition of a monitoring mode, multi-threading capabilities for improved performance, and the ability to dump unattached code chunks. They also addressed a bug related to the 32-bit build and added entry-point recovery through databases. These changes suggest a focus on improving the tool's ability to analyze and extract information from running processes.
memorywindowsdiskmalwaredumping
glmcdona/FoosRL
Oct 2018 - Feb 2020
Contributions:21 commits, 18 pushes, 1 branch in 1 year 4 months
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