HybridML CyberShield for explainable proactive intrusion detection in enterprise and IoT networks

Abstract

Modern networks are becoming increasingly complex as the number of interconnections grows and the number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices rapidly increases, making it possible for complex cyberattacks, including zero-day attacks, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, and advanced persistent threats (APTs), to take root. Current traditional IDSs and individual machine learning/deep learning methods have drawbacks, including limited ability to learn from new attacks, high false alarm rates, limited interpretability, and scalability issues. These constraints hinder their usefulness in enterprise-level and IoT-based cybersecurity applications. To overcome these challenges, this paper introduces HybridML-CyberShield, a hybrid machine learning system designed for proactive cyber threat intelligence and intrusion detection. The framework introduces CNN–BiLSTM deep learning networks to represent traffic in a spatiotemporal manner and adopts ensemble machine learning classifiers, such as Random Forest, Support Vector Machine, and Gradient Boosting, to enhance the robustness of traffic detection and its interpretability. A Proactive Threat Scoring Mechanism (PTSM) is added to prioritise threats based on attack probability, attack severity, and confidence, enabling adaptive incident response prioritisation. Additionally, SHAP and LIME models also provide both global and local interpretability, resulting in greater transparency and analyst trust. Experimental evaluation across various benchmark cybersecurity datasets shows that HybridML-CyberShield achieves up to 98.4% accuracy on the CICIDS2017 dataset, with strong F1-scores, AUC-ROC values, and fewer false-positive alerts. The proposed architecture is scalable, transparent and almost real-time for enterprise and IoT cybersecurity monitoring environments.