Emerging AI threats in cybercrime: a review of zero-day attacks via machine, deep, and federated learning

Abstract The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) revolutionized both cybersecurity defenses and cybercriminals' methods to exploit vulnerabilities. Cybercriminals continue to exploit previously undiscovered vulnerabilities, known as zero-day attacks, posing severe threats to cybersecurity. These attacks are particularly challenging to detect, as they target unknown weaknesses in systems before security teams can respond or act. Traditional intrusion detection systems (IDS) rely heavily on pre-existing attack signatures, making them ineffective against zero-day threats. Machine learning (ML) algorithms have recently become a promising solution for enhancing IDS capabilities by identifying anomalies and predicting potential vulnerabilities in real time. This review paper explores how cutting-edge AI techniques, specifically ML, DL, and federated learning (FL), are harnessed to counter zero-day attacks. AI is used to defend against cyberattacks that exploit vulnerabilities unknown to existing security software. This research explores different AI methods used in cybersecurity, analyzes the data used to train these AI models, and evaluates how well various algorithms perform in actual cyberattacks. Moreover, key challenges in deploying ML for zero-day detection are highlighted, including handling imbalanced data, generalization across diverse types of attacks, and the trade-offs between accuracy and computational cost. The paper outlines future research directions to enhance AI-based zero-day attack defenses and strengthen proactive cybersecurity strategies.