Revolutionizing Cybersecurity with Machine Learning: A Comprehensive Review and Future Directions

Abstract

In the realm of computing, data science has revolutionized cybersecurity operations and technologies. The key to creating automated and intelligent security systems lies in extracting patterns or insights from cybersecurity data and building data-driven models. Data science, encompassing various scientific approaches, machine learning techniques, processes, and systems, studies real-world occurrences through data analysis. Machine learning techniques, known for their flexibility, scalability, and adaptability to new and unknown challenges, have been applied across many scientific fields. Cybersecurity is rapidly expanding due to significant advancements in social networks, cloud and web technologies, online banking, mobile environments, smart grids, and more. Various machine learning techniques have effectively addressed a wide range of computer security issues. This article reviews several machine learning applications in cybersecurity, including phishing detection, network intrusion detection, keystroke dynamics authentication, cryptography, human interaction proofs, spam detection in social networks, smart meter energy consumption profiling, and security concerns associated with machine learning techniques themselves. The methodology involves collecting a large dataset of phishing and legitimate instances, extracting relevant features such as email headers, content, and URLs, and training a machine learning model using supervised learning algorithms. These models can effectively identify phishing emails and websites with high accuracy and low false positive rates. To enhance phishing detection, it is recommended to continuously update the training dataset to include new phishing techniques and employ ensemble methods that combine multiple machine learning models for improved performance