Development Cyber Risk Assessment for Intrusion Detection Using Enhanced Random Forest

In cybersecurity, the lack of statistical data on cyber-attacks presents a significant challenge from an insurance perspective, hindering the accurate calculation of insurance premiums, furthermore assessing cybersecurity risk exposure and identifying high-risk threat categories. Effective intrusion detection systems (IDS) are paramount in addressing these issues. This research introduces a sophisticated cyber risk assessment model utilizing the Random Forest classification algorithm, tailored explicitly for IDS, and leverages the comprehensive CIC-IDS 2017 dataset. The central objective was to engineer robust models capable of classifying a broad array of cyber threats, focusing on classification accuracy. The model achieved an accurate average classification rate of 96.94% through systematic experimentation and hyperparameter tuning.This study found that 'n_estimators' values of 10 to 300 did not affect cyberattack performance. It was also shown that Bagging and bootstrapping improve model stability by mitigating variance and improving accuracy without many trees. Model performance was high, with an average F1-Score of 97.86%. Cyber-attack statistics are scarce, and from an insurance perspective, the lack of statistical data on cyber-attacks hinders the calculation of insurance premiums. Risk assessment allows for informed self-insurance or risk transfer processes ensuring that policies align with risk management strategies and premium calculations.