A Hybrid CNN–BiGRU Deep Learning Model for DDoS Attack Detection in Cybersecurity

Abstract

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks remain one of the most serious threats to modern network infrastructures, as they overwhelm systems with massive traffic and disrupt legitimate services. Traditional intrusion detection systems often struggle to detect complex and evolving attack patterns due to their reliance on manual feature engineering and limited learning capability. To address this issue, this study proposes a hybrid deep learning model that integrates Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Units (BiGRU) for efficient DDoS attack detection. The CNN component is used to automatically extract important spatial features from network traffic data, while the BiGRU layer captures temporal dependencies and sequential patterns in the traffic flows. The proposed model is evaluated using the CICDDoS2019 dataset, which contains realistic benign and attack traffic across multiple DDoS categories. Experimental results demonstrate that the model achieves high performance in both binary and multiclass classification tasks, obtaining an accuracy of 99.82% for binary detection and 99.21% for multiclass classification. The results indicate that the hybrid CNN–BiGRU architecture effectively improves detection accuracy and provides a reliable approach for intelligent network intrusion detection systems.