To be fair, it sounds like it uses a combination of an IE bug and Flash bug.
The exploit leverages a previously unknown use-after-free vulnerability, and uses a well-known Flash exploitation technique to achieve arbitrary memory access and bypass Windows’ ASLR and DEP protections.
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The SWF file calls back to Javascript in IE to trigger the IE bug and overwrite the length field of a Flash vector object in the heapspray.
For now. Reading into it, it seems like they found one of the useful UAFs that facilitates a memory write instead of your less useful CALL virt_func. Flash is just a means to create an infoleak by over-wrting the vector length, it is likely that you could do the same without any dependencies by just targeting IE itself.