Not sure if that's very correct. I'd say it's not about skills, but about such actions still generally not being prosecuted in Russia.
Of course there's also the issue of low-level reverse engineering skills, which may have been prestigious for longer in Russia due to level of life (old hardware being used longer, at some point with DOS), hacker movies cargo cult combined with Russians feeling the social need to present themselves smarter than they are (for example, all those award papers for stupid competitions in school where children who've had in their life an hour-long explanation of, for example, combinatorics or basic discrete math win, and those who haven't lose or don't get there).