An efficient approach for cyber-attack detection by using machine learning and deep learning algorithms

Abstract

Cybercrime gained traction in the late 20th century. The capabilities of cyber-attackers have improved dramatically. One of the biggest challenges facing cybersecurity developers is safeguarding consumers' security and privacy. Interest in using AI approaches in cybersecurity has grown significantly because of the incredible proficiency these techniques have demonstrated across all domains. Even while machine learning algorithms are very effective at identifying malicious activity, there are still certain issues that lower performance accuracy. This paper has the novelty of deploying the Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) meta-heuristic algorithm with the K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) classifier to detect cyber-attacks. It proposes a variant approach called KNN+Bee that detects attacks efficiently, achieving 99.86% overall accuracy. The NSL-KDD dataset of cyberattacks has been leveraged in the training and testing phases. The proposed approach has been contrasted with the most popular machine learning. According to experimental findings, the suggested model delves deeper into the identification of cyberattacks. It achieves unprecedented performance, outperforming other models in terms of precision, Recall, F-score and MCC. Furthermore, popular deep learning models have been implemented and examined on the same dataset. Results prove that GRU is the most accurate, reaching 99.71%.