Developing a simple and efficient attack detection system for ensuring the security of cloud systems against cyberthreats is a crucial and demanding process in the present time. In traditional work, various machine-learning-based detection methodologies have been developed for securing the cloud network. However, those methodologies face the complications of overfitting, complex system design, difficulty understanding, and higher time consumption. Hence, the proposed work contributes to the design and development of an effective security model for detecting cyberthreats from cloud systems. The proposed framework encompasses the modules of preprocessing and normalization, feature extraction, optimization, and prediction. An improved principal component analysis (IPCA) model is used to extract the relevant features from the normalized dataset. Then, a hybrid grasshopper–crow search optimization (GSCSO) is employed to choose the relevant features for training and testing operations. Finally, an isolated heuristic neural network (IHNN) algorithm is used to predict whether the data flow is normal or intrusive. Popular and publicly available datasets such as NSL-KDD, BoT-IoT, KDD Cup’99, and CICIDS 2017 are used for implementing the detection system. For validation, the different performance indicators, such as detection accuracy (AC) and F1-score, are measured and compared with the proposed GSCSO-IHNN system. On average, the GSCO-IHNN system achieved 99.5% ACC and 0.999 F1 scores on these datasets. The results of the performance study show that the GSCSO-IHNN method outperforms the other security models. Ultimately, this research strives to contribute to the ongoing efforts to fortify the security of cloud systems, making them resilient against cyber threats more simply and efficiently.