FWIW, I cannot reproduce the Rapid7 PoC. Per the R7 write-up, they can get around the limitation of only addressing things in the 0x30303030 - 0x39393939 address space (including 0x2e2e2e2e) by doing a heap spray.
But at least in my naive testing on a single VMware VM that I have handy, I cannot get the heap spray to get anywhere near that address range. For me, the spray starts pretty consistently around the 0xcnnnnnnn range.
As such, while the heap spray is indeed succeeding at placing known bytes at guessable locations, the fact that these allocations happen at higher than reachable memory locations makes the heap spray accomplish nothing.
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