Using Machine Learning to Predict Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Attack

The IT space is growing in all aspects ranging from bandwidth, storage, processing speed, machine learning and data analysis. This growth has consequently led to more cyber threat and attacks which now requires innovative and predictive security approach that uses cutting-edge technologies in order to fight the menace. The patterns of the cyber threats will be observed so that proper analysis from different sets of data will be used to develop a model that will depend on the available data. Distributed Denial of Service is one of the most common threats and attacks that is ravaging computing devices on the internet. This research talks about the approaches and the development of machine learning classifiers to detect DDoS attacks before it eventually happen. The model is built with seven different selection techniques each using ten machine learning classifiers. The model learns to understand the normal network traffic so that it can detect an ICMP, TCP and UDP DDoS traffic when they arrive. The goal is to build a data-driven, intelligent and decision-making machine learning algorithm model that will use classifiers to categorize normal and DDoS traffic using KDD-99 dataset. Results have shown that some classifiers have very good predictions obtained within a very short time.