Loading article...
Loading article...
Stream/Area:
-
Subject:
-
Paper ID:
IJSREM68138
Volume:
10 |
10 |
Oct 2026
Pages:
1-7
Publication Frequency:
Monthly (12 issues per year)
License:International Journal of Scientific Research in Engineering and Management follows the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) License, allowing free use and distribution with proper attribution.

Computer science & Engineering (Data Science)
Gurunanak Institute Of Technology ,Nagpur

Computer science & Engineering (Data Science)
Gurunanak Institute Of Technology ,Nagpur
Computer science & Engineering (Data Science)
Gurunanak Institute Of Technology ,Nagpur
Computer science & Engineering (Data Science)
Gurunanak Institute Of Technology ,Nagpur
Cyber attacks are becoming more automated and adaptive and signature-based security tools can miss attacks whose patterns have not been seen before. This review surveys research on AI-based detection of known and unknown cyber attacks. We organise the literature into eight themes: the threat landscape of unknown and zero-day attacks supervised and ensemble learning unsupervised and one-class anomaly detection, deep representation learning open-set recognition and metric learning few-shot meta and reinforcement learning benchmark datasets and evaluation and deployment explainability and governance. For each theme we summarise representative work from twenty recent studies (2024–2026) the techniques used and the limitations reported by the original authors. We then compare detection approaches and datasets and use a proposed web-based system built with Python Scikit-learn and Flask as a reference case that shows how the themes combine in one pipeline. The review identifies open challenges including generalization across datasets evaluation on truly unseen attacks false alarms concept drift adversarial robustness explainability and lightweight real-time deployment. We conclude with research directions for trustworthy and deployable detection of unknown cyber attacks.
KEYWORDS
Detecting known and unknown cyber attacks sits at the intersection of machine learning, network security, and data engineering. This review organised twenty recent studies and supporting literature into eight themes, compared detection approaches and datasets, and illustrated their integration through a proposed web-based detection system. The analysis shows that supervised, one-class, deep, open-set, meta-learning, and reinforcement-learning methods each solve part of the problem, and that reported scores are highest in binary or in-distribution tests. Generalization across datasets, identification of truly unseen attacks, false-alarm control, concept drift, adversarial robustness, and lightweight real-time deployment remain unresolved. For the reference system, the next steps are to evaluate it on modern datasets with held-out attack families, to report precision, recall, F1-score, false-positive rate, and latency, to add explainable outputs, and to test continuous learning under controlled conditions. No single model can be expected to detect every future attack, but a layered, explainable, and continuously evaluated system can raise the chance that abnormal behaviour is noticed early and give analysts useful evidence.
[1] K. Scarfone and P. Mell, "Guide to intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDPS)," Nat. Inst. Standards Technol., Gaithersburg, MD, USA, Spec. Publ. 800-94, Feb. 2007. [2] L. Bilge and T. Dumitraş, "Before we knew it: An empirical study of zero-day attacks in the real world," in Proc. ACM Conf. Comput. Commun. Secur. (CCS), 2012, pp. 833–844. [3] A. L. Buczak and E. Guven, "A survey of data mining and machine learning methods for cyber security intrusion detection," IEEE Commun. Surveys Tuts., vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 1153–1176, 2016. [4] V. Chandola, A. Banerjee, and V. Kumar, "Anomaly detection: A survey," ACM Comput. Surv., vol. 41, no. 3, Art. no. 15, 2009. [5] L. Y. Por, Z. Dai, S. J. Leem, Y. Chen, J. Yang, F. Binbeshr, K. Y. Phan, and C. S. Ku, "A systematic literature review on AI-based methods and challenges in detecting zero-day attacks," IEEE Access, vol. 12, pp. 144150–144163, 2024, doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2024.3455410. [6] S. G. E. Gökstorp, S. Katsikeas, and P. Johnson, "Machine learning for cybersecurity: A comprehensive literature review," ACM Comput. Surv., vol. 58, no. 9, 2026. [7] R. Sommer and V. Paxson, "Outside the closed world: On using machine learning for network intrusion detection," in Proc. IEEE Symp. Secur. Privacy (S&P), 2010, pp. 305–316. [8] A. Al Siam et al., "Securing the unseen: A comprehensive exploration review of AI-powered models for zero-day attack detection," Expert Syst., vol. 43, no. 3, 2026. [9] B. Kitchenham, "Procedures for performing systematic reviews," Keele Univ., Keele, U.K., Tech. Rep. TR/SE-0401, 2004. [10] W. J. Scheirer, A. de Rezende Rocha, A. Sapkota, and T. E. Boult, "Toward open set recognition," IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell., vol. 35, no. 7, pp. 1757–1772, 2013.
Publication Date
10/20/2026
Peer Review Type
Double-Blind Peer Review
Review Rounds: 2
Documents
Article Views
1
Total views since publication
PDF Downloads
7
Total downloads since publication
Geographic Reach
5
Digital Preservation: This article is permanently archived on Zenodo and complies with all data preservation standards across major indexing platforms.
Plagiarism Screening
This manuscript has been checked for plagiarism using TurnitinPlagiarismChecker software.
Conflict of Interest
The authors declare no conflict of interest related to this research work.
Funding Information
No funding information available for this research.
Related research in the same subject area
Loading similar articles...