The significant growth in the use of the Internet and the rapid development of network technologies are associated with an increased risk of network attacks. Network attacks refer to all types of unauthorized access to a network including any attempts to damage and disrupt the network, often leading to serious consequences. Network attack detection is an active area of research in the community of cybersecurity. In the literature, there are various descriptions of network attack detection systems involving various intelligent-based techniques including machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models. However, although such techniques have proved useful within specific domains, no technique has proved useful in mitigating all kinds of network attacks. This is because some intelligent-based approaches lack essential capabilities that render them reliable systems that are able to confront different types of network attacks. This was the main motivation behind this research, which evaluates contemporary intelligent-based research directions to address the gap that still exists in the field. The main components of any intelligent-based system are the training datasets, the algorithms, and the evaluation metrics; these were the main benchmark criteria used to assess the intelligent-based systems included in this research article. This research provides a rich source of references for scholars seeking to determine their scope of research in this field. Furthermore, although the paper does present a set of suggestions about future inductive directions, it leaves the reader free to derive additional insights about how to develop intelligent-based systems to counter current and future network attacks.

In today’s digitalized era, Online Social Networking platforms are growing to be a vital aspect of each individual’s daily life. The availability of the vast amount of information and their open nature attracts the interest of cybercriminals to create malicious bots. Malicious bots in these platforms are automated or semi-automated entities used in nefarious ways while simulating human behavior. Moreover, such bots pose serious cyber threats and security concerns to society and public opinion. They are used to exploit vulnerabilities for illicit benefits such as spamming, fake profiles, spreading inappropriate/false content, click farming, hashtag hijacking, and much more. Cybercriminals and researchers are always engaged in an arms race as new and updated bots are created to thwart ever-evolving detection technologies. This literature review attempts to compile and compare the most recent advancements in Machine Learning-based techniques for the detection and classification of bots on five primary social media platforms namely Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Weibo. We bring forth a concise overview of all the supervised, semi-supervised, and unsupervised methods, along with the details of the datasets provided by the researchers. Additionally, we provide a thorough breakdown of the extracted feature categories. Furthermore, this study also showcases a brief rundown of the challenges and opportunities encountered in this field, along with prospective research directions and promising angles to explore.

Detection of minor leaks in oil or gas pipelines is a critical and persistent problem in the oil and gas industry. Many organisations have long relied on fixed hardware or manual assessments to monitor leaks. With rapid industrialisation and technological advancements, innovative engineering technologies that are cost-effective, faster, and easier to implement are essential. Herein, machine learning-based anomaly detection models are proposed to solve the problem of oil and gas pipeline leakage. Five machine learning algorithms, namely, random forest, support vector machine, k-nearest neighbour, gradient boosting, and decision tree, were used to develop detection models for pipeline leaks. The support vector machine algorithm, with an accuracy of 97.4%, overperformed the other algorithms in detecting pipeline leakage and thus proved its efficiency as an accurate model for detecting leakage in oil and gas pipelines.