The information culture of students is studied as a structural element of their sociocultural potential. The study is focused on identifying trends in the development of the professional information culture of university students in the Middle Urals in the context of digitalization of the socio-cultural space. The research is based on a complex of sociological approaches used by the Ural academic school to study learners. The empirical base was made up of materials from questionnaires and content analysis of personal pages of the Vkontakte social network, subjects being university students in the Sverdlovskaya oblast. Professional information security culture is considered in two aspects - technological as cybersecurity and socio-cultural, which determines the meanings of the content. Three aspects of the socio-cultural potential of modern students are revealed - cognitive (intellectual), ideological and socio-positional. The typology of students is presented on the basis of the correlation of worldview attitudes and the characteristics of the knowledge acquired. The article provides data on the degree of satisfaction with the quality of the developed soft-professional and hard-professional skills as an indicator of the cognitive aspect, on the attitude towards Russian citizenship, an indicator of the ideological and socio-positional aspect. Self-assessment of students' digital skills is presented, the degree of importance of social networks and other means of electronic communication in relation to the future profession is clarified, information about the future profession is collected from the personal pages of students in the Vkontakte network. Differences are noted between groups of students majoring in liberal arts, natural science, mathematics, engineering, technical and socio-political. The conclusion is made about the orientation towards the technological effectiveness of information knowledge, the insufficient level of the professional information culture and the potential of social networks to replenish it.