A Flurry of Bidding Has Started on a Mint Condition Spider-Man Comic

An impressively well-preserved issue of The Amazing Spider-Man No. 1 from 1963 will be sold at auction early next year and bids have already reached six figures.

The inaugural issue, which cost 12 cents when it hit newsstands 60 years ago, is in such good condition that it’s being called the “world’s greatest copy” by Heritage Auctions, which is selling the collectible as part of its Comics & Comic Art SignatureAuction, running from Jan. 11-14.

Considered to be in “near mint/mint” condition, the issue has a grading of 9.8 out of 10 from Certified Guaranty Company (CGC), a third-party grading service for pop-culture collectibles.

The comic is from a collection that was amassed by an employee of a museum who stored the comics in tight packs on the museum’s premises. It’s “considered one of the best Silver Age collections ever discovered,” said Heritage Auctions, referring to the Silver Age of Comic Books, a period that spanned roughly from 1956 to 1970 and saw the creation of some of the most famous superheroes including the X-Men, the Hulk, Iron Man and, of course, Spider-Man.

As of Wednesday afternoon, the current bid for the comic, which marked Spider-Man’s first appearance in his eponymous title, stood at US$220,000.

In July, another first issue of The Amazing Spider-Man, in slightly worse condition, sold for US$520,380.

Also selling at the auction is “one of the world’s finest copies” of Superman No. 1 from 1939, according to Heritage. It’s one of only two in the world graded a 7.0 by CGC and considered to be in “fine/very fine” condition.

“This is the finest unrestored copy we’ve ever offered,” the auction house said online.

A Superman No. 1—with a CGC grading of 8.0—sold for US$5.3 million in January 2022, breaking the record for the most expensive comic ever sold.

As of Wednesday afternoon, the highest bid for the issue stands at US$460,000.

As tech leaders race to bring Windows systems back online after Friday’s software update by cybersecurity company CrowdStrike crashed around 8.5 million machines worldwide, experts share with CIO Journal their takeaways for preparing for the next major information technology outage.

Be familiar with how vendors develop, test and release their software

IT leaders should hold vendors deeply integrated within IT systems, such as CrowdStrike , to a “very high standard” of development, release quality and assurance, said Neil MacDonald , a Gartner vice president.

“Any security vendor has a responsibility to do extensive regression testing on all versions of Windows before an update is rolled out,” he said.

That involves asking existing vendors to explain how they write software, what testing they do and whether customers may choose how quickly to roll out an update.

“Incidents like this remind all of us in the CIO community of the importance of ensuring availability, reliability and security by prioritizing guardrails such as deployment and testing procedures and practices,” said Amy Farrow, chief information officer of IT automation and security company Infoblox.

Re-evaluate how your firm accepts software updates from ‘trusted’ vendors

While automatically accepting software updates has become the norm—and a recommended security practice—the CrowdStrike outage is a reminder to take a pause, some CIOs said.

“We still should be doing the full testing of packages and upgrades and new features,” said Paul Davis, a field chief information security officer at software development platform maker JFrog . undefined undefined Though it’s not feasible to test every update, especially for as many as hundreds of software vendors, Davis said he makes it a priority to test software patches according to their potential severity and size.

Automation, and maybe even artificial intelligence-based IT tools, can help.

“Humans are not very good at catching errors in thousands of lines of code,” said Jack Hidary, chief executive of AI and quantum company SandboxAQ. “We need AI trained to look for the interdependence of new software updates with the existing stack of software.”

Develop a disaster recovery plan

An incident rendering Windows computers unusable is similar to a natural disaster with systems knocked offline, said Gartner’s MacDonald. That’s why businesses should consider natural disaster recovery plans for maintaining the resiliency of their operations.

One way to do that is to set up a “clean room,” or an environment isolated from other systems, to use to bring critical systems back online, according to Chirag Mehta, a cybersecurity analyst at Constellation Research.

Businesses should also hold tabletop exercises to simulate risk scenarios, including IT outages and potential cyber threats, Mehta said.

Companies that back up data regularly were likely less impacted by the CrowdStrike outage, according to Victor Zyamzin, chief business officer of security company Qrator Labs. “Another suggestion for companies, and we’ve been saying that again and again for decades, is that you should have some backup procedure applied, running and regularly tested,” he said.

Review vendor and insurance contracts

For any vendor with a significant impact on company operations , MacDonald said companies can review their contracts and look for clauses indicating the vendors must provide reliable and stable software.

“That’s where you may have an advantage to say, if an update causes an outage, is there a clause in the contract that would cover that?” he said.

If it doesn’t, tech leaders can aim to negotiate a discount serving as a form of compensation at renewal time, MacDonald added.

The outage also highlights the importance of insurance in providing companies with bottom-line protection against cyber risks, said Peter Halprin, a partner with law firm Haynes Boone focused on cyber insurance.

This coverage can include protection against business income losses, such as those associated with an outage, whether caused by the insured company or a service provider, Halprin said.

Weigh the advantages and disadvantages of the various platforms

The CrowdStrike update affected only devices running Microsoft Windows-based systems , prompting fresh questions over whether enterprises should rely on Windows computers.

CrowdStrike runs on Windows devices through access to the kernel, the part of an operating system containing a computer’s core functions. That’s not the same for Apple ’s Mac operating system and Linux, which don’t allow the same level of access, said Mehta.

Some businesses have converted to Chromebooks , simple laptops developed by Alphabet -owned Google that run on the Chrome operating system . “Not all of them require deeper access to things,” Mehta said. “What are you doing on your laptop that actually requires Windows?”