Software defined network (SDN) integrated vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is a magnificent technique for smart transportation as it raises the efficiency, safety, manageability, and comfort of traffic. SDN‐integrated VANET (SDN‐int‐VANET) has numerous benefits, but it is susceptible to threats like distributed denial of service (DDoS). Several methods were suggested for DDoS attack detection (AD), but the existing approaches to optimization have given a base for enhancing the parameters. An incorrect selection of parameters results in a poor performance and poor fit to the data. To overcome these issues, residual‐based temporal attention red fox‐convolutional neural network (RTARF‐CNN) for detecting DDoS attacks in SDN‐int‐VANET is introduced in this manuscript. The input data is taken from the SDN DDoS attack dataset. For restoring redundancy and missing value, developed random forest and local least squares (DRFLLS) are applied. Then the important features are selected from the pre‐processed data with the help of stacked contractive autoencoders (St‐CAE), which reduces the processing time of the introduced method. The selected features are classified by residual‐based temporal attention‐convolutional neural network (RTA‐CNN). The weight parameter of RTA‐CNN is optimized with the help of red fox optimization (RFO) for better classification. The introduced method is implemented in the PYTHON platform. The RTARF‐CNN attains 99.8% accuracy, 99.5% sensitivity, 99.80% precision, and 99.8% specificity. The effectiveness of the introduced technique is compared with the existing approaches.