using techniques that cannot really be discussed here that could be applied across "families of operating systems"
Indeed. There was a nice little blog post somewhere in the depths of the Microsoft website that pointed out that of the many recent patches issued for Windows 7 and Windows 8, Windows XP was also patched at the same time as it was vulnerable.
Hence, as the article went on to point out, it doesn't take much of a stretch of the imagination to guess that the "dark side" will make a profitable business out of "back-porting" Windows 7 and Windows 8 vulnerabilities by reverse-engineering the 7/8 patches them and creating exploits for XP.
like the well known abuse of cryptography now being applied for extortion.
Yeah, those are some pretty scary ones. I personally haven't seen them in action, but I've heard a few war stories.