Russia is conducting systematic work to train hackers, starting with universities.
The head of the SBU’s cybersecurity department, Ilya Vitiuk, said this in an interview with Forbes, Kommersant Ukrainian reports 
According to Vitiuk, the SBU has documents showing that Russia’s national system of scaling cyber aggression has been operating since at least 2016, and officers of the current GRU and FSB reserves have been teaching students cyber offensive disciplines at military and technical universities.
“Students conduct scientific and technical work on the creation of software tools, study the architecture of logistics, energy, water supply in Ukraine and other countries, and write term papers and master’s theses on this,” said Vitiuk.
When the training is completed, the Russian special services select the best graduates to work for the GRU and FSB or to work under contract under their control.
According to Vitiuk, Russia’s investments in cyberattacks reach billions of rubles, and this amount continues to grow. The Russians are also trying to combine kinetic, psychological and cyber operations.
In 2022-20223, the SBU recorded more than 9,000 Russian cyberattacks. Each time, Russia scales up and improves the quality of attacks: from 1400 in 2021 to 4500 in 2022 and 2023. We are talking only about those cyberattacks that the SBU repels.
As a reminder, one of the most recent high-profile cyberattacks by the Russian Federation was the attack on Kyivstar on 12 December 2023, which left 24.4 million subscribers of the largest operator without communication for several days.
It has also recently become known that Ukrainian intelligence officers hacked into the servers of the Russian Ministry of Defence. The information obtained allows us to fully understand the work of the entire ministry and all its individual units, as well as identify the leadership and all key individuals in the institution.