[mcpherrinm]

There are two parts here: an exploit for Adobe Reader, and a local privilege escalation for Windows.

The Adobe one is a standard memory safety bug. This is the kind of thing you can find with fuzzers pretty easily, or by examining file formats for potential overflows. The exploitation techniques here are using ROP chains to get execution to shellcode from a JavaScript heap-sprayed shellcode. Both are widely used techniques, and there are tools to assist exploit writers in finding and using ROP gadgets.

I don't know Windows as well, so I can't speak to the second exploit.