Review: iSEC Partners Security QA Toolbar

For: Small footprint, low admin overhead
Against: Very high price for a browser-based toolbar, lack of documentation and support
Verdict: QA teams looking for specific testing features in a lightweight product may find this toolbar worth a look

This immediate integration as a toolbar is designed to assist quality-assurance personnel with web application testing.

Installation of the toolbar is straightforward and quick. As soon as the browser is restarted, the toolbar appears with several interactive buttons that launch a handful of common web- application vulnerability tests. All tasks, from licensing to running reports, are handled within the toolbar itself.

We experienced some intermittent problems using the SecurityQA Toolbar during a few of the tests. Also, the update feature was not working for version 2.0 at the time of testing. However, despite these hurdles, it did successfully identify several common and critical web application vulnerabilities and produced detailed findings, including some nice graphs.

Unfortunately, we were not able to research or identify what may have caused the testing issues we experienced, since documentation for the SecurityQA Toolbar is virtually non-existent. There is some information is available within the reporting feature, including descriptions of the vulnerabilities, but the actual toolbar does not come with any documentation to help with installation, use or configuration.

Having said that, from a support perspective, the toolbar component is straightforward and should be easy to understand for most users. Although the iSEC Partners website does not have a dedicated support link, and the only phone number listed for the organisation is the general information number, the company does offer support with the purchase price of the SecurityQA Toolbar.

Pricing for the Security QA Toolbar starts at $1,500 per seat for unlimited scanning. 10 licenses: US$12,000. 20 licenses: US$22,500. Site license: US$55,000/yr for unlimited seats and scanning. We found the overall pricing to be very steep given the lack of documentation and support.

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