AI FOR CYBERSECURITY

Presented By - Presented By -

Abstract -The rate with which cyberattacks are taking behavior. Such methods, driven by AI, have the ability
place makes both individuals and organizations highly to evolve dynamically in accordance with new attack
threatened. More advanced detection and response vectors. This method enables real-time detection and
measures to security incidents are needed. Traditional threats before them do much damage.
cybersecurity solutions like signature-based detection
The paper is focused on attacks in two important
systems are now slow because new, sophisticated
cybersecurity areas: anomaly detection and threat
attacks keep emerging at such a rate. This paper
prediction. In anomaly detection, one refers to the
addresses the use of artificial intelligence and machine
identification of nonnormal network behavior, often a
learning techniques to improve cybersecurity through
condition of an ongoing attack or unauthorized
real-time anomaly detection and threat prediction.
activity. On the other hand, threat prediction uses
The paper focuses on AI models for anomaly detection
historical data and predictive models to predict the
and threat prediction. The system architecture is
probability of future threats with enough time for
comprised of several machine learning models, such
protective actions to be initiated beforehand.
as isolation forests, neural networks, to identify
deviation from normal behavior and predict possible This paper is aimed at establishing a robust system
threats. Preliminary results compared to traditional architecture using machine learning algorithms
approaches have depicted better detection accuracy, capable of improving the accuracy and efficiency
fewer false positives, and faster response time. These levels of cybersecurity systems utilizing models for
findings indicate that AI-based solutions shall improve anomaly detection and threat predictions in network
the effectiveness of the cyber intrusion detection environments using isolation forests, neural networks,
system, fraud prevention system, and network and support vector machines. We test the validity of
security systems. This work falls within the use of AI to these models using publicly available datasets for
address emerging cyber threats and protect critical cybersecurity, CICIDS and KDD Cup.
infrastructure.
II. LITERATURE SURVEY
Keywords – Anomaly Detection, Machine Learning,
Cybersecurity, Threat Protection, Intrusion Detection AI and ML have emerged as the best tools in modern
System (IDS), Network Security. cybersecurity to complement loopholes left by
traditional systems; for instance, signature-based
I.INTRODUCTION
methods, which have proven ineffective against new,
With this ever-expanding space digitally, threats are
sophisticated threats.
growing not only in their scale and scope but also
potentially to harm people, companies, and 1 Anomaly detection: AI techniques - among others,
infrastructures whose failures can unleash devastating Isolation Forests and Autoencoders - are commonly
results. Traditional methods of cybersecurity, firewalls, used for identifying anomalous behaviours in network
and signature-based detection cannot keep up with
traffic. Such models are good at detecting zero-day
the pace of the evolving and fast-changing attack
attacks but normally suffer from high false positive
technology. Traditional systems rely on predefined
rules and signatures of known attacks and therefore rates. Approaches hybridizing anomaly detection with
cannot protect against new unknown or advanced more traditional methods are now becoming relevant
attacks such as zero-day exploits and APTs. to ensure greater improvements in detection accuracy.

2 Threat Forecasting: AI models like the Random

The increasing frequency of cyberattacks places a
Forests and also deep learning models such as LSTMs
demand for more adaptive and intelligent security
predict the cyberattacks based on their historical data.
mechanisms. Powerful tools from artificial intelligence
Thereby, techniques like these can be used for
(AI) and machine learning (ML) are identified to enrich
proactive defense mechanisms, discovering impending
cybersecurity through learning from huge datasets
threats before they happen. Even so, scalability and
and identifying malicious patterns that indicate
interpretability remain a concern, and work is in
injurious
progress to have Explainable AI (XAI) to overcome the
"black box" characteristics of deep learning models.
3 IDS: Intrusion Detection Systems: AI-based IDS: IV. DATASET
Algorithms like ANNs and RNNs are used. It further The effectiveness of AI models in cybersecurity heavily
enhances the detection ratio of known attacks as well relies on the quality and diversity of the datasets used
as zero-day attacks. It manages the huge volume of for training and evaluation. In this paper, publicly
traffic in real-time. So, the significant problem for this available cybersecurity datasets are utilized to build
is an unbalanced dataset; hence techniques like and test the anomaly detection and threat prediction
SMOTE are being applied. models. The selected datasets are well-established in
the cybersecurity community, containing labelled data
4 Fraud Detection: Another area where AI is deployed
of both normal and malicious behaviours.
is in financial fraud detection using k-NN and SVMs to
identify any suspicious transactions. Even though this 1. CICIDS 2017 Dataset - Description: The CICIDS 2017
produces excellent performances, the models need dataset, provided by the Canadian Institute for
time-to-time update as fraudsters keep innovating Cybersecurity, is a comprehensive dataset that
with new techniques. Despite these progresses, there represents real-world network traffic. It includes a
are still tough challenges such as model wide variety of attacks such as Distributed Denial of
interpretability, scalability, and vulnerabilities towards Service (DDoS), brute force attacks, botnets, and SQL
adversarial attacks. These times call for AI systems injections, alongside normal network traffic.
that are robust, transparent, and adaptive with regard
Features: The dataset consists of 80 network flow
to ever-evolving cybersecurity threats.
features, such as source IP, destination IP, protocol,
III. SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE and timestamp, capturing detailed traffic patterns.
The AI-based cybersecurity system will identify and Relevance: This dataset is used for training the
react to real-time threats by having the following anomaly detection models to identify unusual traffic
important parts of its system:
patterns.
1 Data Collection: Collects data from sources like 2. NSL-KDD Dataset – Description: The NSL-KDD
network traffic, logs of systems, public datasets. Both dataset is an improved version of the original KDD Cup
normal as well as malicious data are collected for the 1999 dataset, designed to address issues like duplicate
training of AI models. records. It contains labelled records of normal and
attack traffic, with categories such as DoS (Denial of
2 Data Preprocessing: Clean, normalize the raw data
Service), R2L (Remote to Local), U2R (User to Root),
besides handling missing values, scaling, and even
and probing attacks.
balancing imbalanced datasets by using techniques
like SMOTE. Features: The dataset includes 41 features, such as
connection duration, service type, and the number of
3 Anomaly Detection: It uses models, namely
failed login attempts.
Isolation Forests and Autoencoders, to identify
anomalies that then are passed down for further Relevance: Widely used for evaluating intrusion
analysis to the next module. detection systems, this dataset helps in the
classification and threat prediction stages of the
4 Threat Prediction: Using either Random Forests or
system.
LSTMs, it predicts the likelihood of flagged anomalies
being malicious, thereby giving a threat score based 3. UNSW-NB15 Dataset - Description: The UNSW-
on this risk. NB15 dataset was created using a hybrid approach to
simulate real-world attacks and normal network
5 Response and Mitigation: Activates automatically
traffic. It includes nine types of attacks, such as
against identified threats by blocking offending traffic
worms, backdoors, and exploits.
or alerting the security teams, while learning is
continuous improvement through constant updating. Features: It provides 49 features, including source and
destination IP addresses, port numbers, and protocol
6 Feedback Loop: The system updates its models from
types.
time to time through retraining on new data, and with
human feedback removing false positives and Relevance: This dataset supports the model’s ability to
enhancing the detection of emerging threats. generalize across different types of attacks.
4. MAWI Dataset - Description: The MAWI dataset valuable guidance and support throughout the
contains anonymized network traffic collected from research and development of this paper. Special
backbone links in Japan. It includes normal traffic as thanks to the institutions and researchers who
well as various anomalies caused by real-world provided the datasets and resources that were
cyberattacks. instrumental in this study. I also extend my
Relevance: This dataset is used to test the real-world appreciation to my family and friends for their
applicability of the models by simulating production- unwavering encouragement. Lastly, I am grateful
level network environments. to the community for the opportunity to share my
work on the critical topic of AI for cybersecurity.
5. Synthetic Data - Description: In addition to real-
world datasets, synthetic data may be generated to VII. REFERENCES
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VI. ACKNOWLEDGMENT
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my
advisors, mentors, and colleagues for their