Joe Blackbird Joe Blackbird joined Symantec as a vulnerability researcher in 2003 after completing a degree in computer science with a specialization in computer viruses and malware at the University of Calgary, Canada. He progressed into threat-related data analysis and threat reporting, contributing to various threat-landscape reports published by Symantec until he left to work with Microsoft in 2012. At Microsoft he continues to work with data analysis and reporting as a data scientist with the team behind Windows Defender Anti-Virus.