Labshock Listed First Among Free Ways to Build an OT Home Lab

March 18, 2026 — Mike Holcomb has published a guide to building an OT and ICS cybersecurity home lab without spending money, and Labshock appears as the first entry.

The premise is the cost barrier. Holcomb sets the expensive route against the practical one, noting that dedicated hardware runs to roughly four hundred dollars for a fully loaded PLC before any of the sensors, stack lights, relays or test equipment around it, and that an OT home lab gets expensive fast.

Against that, Labshock is described as a fully virtualised OT environment simulating an oil pumping facility, quick to stand up in Docker and usable both for learning to defend an OT network and for practising penetration testing against one. Holcomb has said elsewhere that the free options are where somebody should start before deciding whether the field is for them.

The list also covers GRFICSv3, ICS honeypots such as Conpot and T-Pot, and the paid learning platforms. The argument closing it is that the amount spent matters less than starting at all.

Holcomb named Labshock again four months later, in a curated list of nineteen OT/ICS resources for 2026, under projects and among the repositories worth cloning.