Interoperability

Information is rarely produced and consumed strictly inside an application. Modern computers exchange information with other computers, store information on the disk, or in the cloud. Quite often, the used data format is undocumented, but there may be the need to interact with the application or extract its data. For example, to extract data from an obsolete software we need to know the used format. Or to take down a botnet, we may need to know its network protocol in order to send commands to the zombie computers it infected.