Internet usage has grown exponentially, with individuals and companies performing multiple daily transactions in cyberspace rather than in the real world. The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has accelerated this process. As a result of the widespread usage of the digital environment, traditional crimes have also shifted to the digital space. Emerging technologies such as cloud computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), social media, wireless communication, and cryptocurrencies are raising security concerns in cyberspace. Recently, cyber criminals have started to use cyber attacks as a service to automate attacks and leverage their impact. Attackers exploit vulnerabilities that exist in hardware, software, and communication layers. Various types of cyber attacks include distributed denial of service (DDoS), phishing, man-in-the-middle, password, remote, privilege escalation, and malware. Due to new-generation attacks and evasion techniques, traditional protection systems such as firewalls, intrusion detection systems, antivirus software, access control lists, etc., are no longer effective in detecting these sophisticated attacks. Therefore, there is an urgent need to find innovative and more feasible solutions to prevent cyber attacks. The paper first extensively explains the main reasons for cyber attacks. Then, it reviews the most recent attacks, attack patterns, and detection techniques. Thirdly, the article discusses contemporary technical and nontechnical solutions for recognizing attacks in advance. Using trending technologies such as machine learning, deep learning, cloud platforms, big data, and blockchain can be a promising solution for current and future cyber attacks. These technological solutions may assist in detecting malware, intrusion detection, spam identification, DNS attack classification, fraud detection, recognizing hidden channels, and distinguishing advanced persistent threats. However, some promising solutions, especially machine learning and deep learning, are not resistant to evasion techniques, which must be considered when proposing solutions against intelligent cyber attacks.

Given the continually rising frequency of cyberattacks, the adoption of artificial intelligence methods, particularly Machine Learning (ML), Deep Learning (DL), and Reinforcement Learning (RL), has become essential in the realm of cybersecurity. These techniques have proven to be effective in detecting and mitigating cyberattacks, which can cause significant harm to individuals, organizations, and even countries. Machine learning algorithms use statistical methods to identify patterns and anomalies in large datasets, enabling security analysts to detect previously unknown threats. Deep learning, a subfield of ML, has shown great potential in improving the accuracy and efficiency of cybersecurity systems, particularly in image and speech recognition. On the other hand, RL is again a subfield of machine learning that trains algorithms to learn through trial and error, making it particularly effective in dynamic environments. We also evaluated the usage of ChatGPT-like AI tools in cyber-related problem domains on both sides, positive and negative. This article provides an overview of how ML, DL, and RL are applied in cybersecurity, including their usage in malware detection, intrusion detection, vulnerability assessment, and other areas. The paper also specifies several research questions to provide a more comprehensive framework to investigate the efficiency of AI and ML models in the cybersecurity domain. The state-of-the-art studies using ML, DL, and RL models are evaluated in each Section based on the main idea, techniques, and important findings. It also discusses these techniques’ challenges and limitations, including data quality, interpretability, and adversarial attacks. Overall, the use of ML, DL, and RL in cybersecurity holds great promise for improving the effectiveness of security systems and enhancing our ability to protect against cyberattacks. Therefore, it is essential to continue developing and refining these techniques to address the ever-evolving nature of cyber threats. Besides, some promising solutions that rely on machine learning, deep learning, and reinforcement learning are susceptible to adversarial attacks, underscoring the importance of factoring in this vulnerability when devising countermeasures against sophisticated cyber threats. We also concluded that ChatGPT can be a valuable tool for cybersecurity, but it should be noted that ChatGPT-like tools can also be manipulated to threaten the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of data.

Recent technological developments in computer systems transfer human life from real to virtual environments. Covid-19 disease has accelerated this process. Cyber criminals’ interest has shifted in a real to virtual life as well. This is because it is easier to commit a crime in cyberspace rather than regular life. Malicious software (malware) is unwanted software which is frequently used by cyber criminals to launch cyber-attacks. Malware variants are continuing to evolve by using advanced obfuscation and packing techniques. These concealing techniques make malware detection and classification significantly challenging. Novel methods which are quite different from traditional methods must be used to effectively combat with new malware variants. Traditional artificial intelligence (AI) specifically machine learning (ML) algorithms are no longer effective in detecting all new and complex malware variants. Deep learning (DL) approach which is quite different from traditional ML algorithms can be a promising solution to the problem of detecting all variants of malware. In this study, a novel deep-learning-based architecture is proposed which can classify malware variants based on a hybrid model. The main contribution of the study is to propose a new hybrid architecture which integrates two wide-ranging pre-trained network models in an optimized manner. This architecture consists of four main stages, namely: data acquisition, the design of deep neural network architecture, training of the proposed deep neural network architecture, and evaluation of the trained deep neural network. The proposed method tested on Malimg, Microsoft BIG 2015, and Malevis datasets. The experimental results show that the suggested method can effectively classify malware with high accuracy which outperforms the state of the art methods in the literature. When proposed method tested on Malimg dataset, 97.78% accuracy is obtained which is outperformed most of the ML-based malware detection method.

Effectively detecting intrusions in the computer networks still remains problematic. This is because cyber attackers are changing packet contents to disguise the intrusion detection system (IDS) recently. Besides, everyday a lot of new devices are added to the computer networks. These new devices are also raising security issues in the computer networks. To effectively manage the computer network flows and provide the security in advance; the components of the IDSs, the approaches and technologies that are used, the nature of the attacks, and the tools that are used needs to be examined deeply. This paper discusses intrusion detection technologies, methodologies, and approaches and also investigates new attack types, protection mechanisms, and recent scientific studies that have been made in this area. In addition, available datasets, well-known IDS tools, and advantages and disadvantages of particular IDSs are explained deeply. We believe that this scientific review study presents a road map for researchers and industry employees who focus on IDSs.

These days, cloud computing is one of the most promising technologies to store information and provide services online efficiently. Using this rapidly developing technology to protect computer-based systems from cyber-related attacks can bring many advantages over traditional protection schemes. The protected assets can be any computer-based systems such as cyber-physical systems (CPS), critical systems, desktop and laptop computers, mobile devices, and Internet of Things (IoT). Malicious software (malware) is any software which targets the computer-based system to launch cyber-attacks to threaten the integrity, confidentiality and availability of the data. To detect the massively growing malware attacks surface, we propose an intelligent behavior-based detection system in the cloud environment. The proposed system first creates a malware dataset on different virtual machines which identify distinctive features efficiently. Then, selected features are given to the learning-based and rule-based detection agents to separate malware from benign samples. Totally, 10,000 program samples have been analyzed to evaluate the performance of the proposed system. The proposed system can detect both known and unknown malware efficiently with high detection and accuracy rate. Besides, the proposed method results have outperformed the leading methods’ results in the literature. Our evaluation results show that the proposed algorithms along with machine learning (ML) classifiers achieve 99.8% detection rate, 0.4% false positive rate, and 99.7% accuracy. Our proposed system and algorithms may assist those who would like to develop a novel malware detection system in the cloud environment.