Abstract
The surge in generic attacks execution against cipher text on the computer network has led to the continuous advancement of the mechanisms to protect information integrity and confidentiality. The implementation of explicit decision tree machine learning algorithm is reported to accurately classifier generic attacks better than some multi-classification algorithms as the multi-classification method suffers from detection oversight. However, there is a need to improve the accuracy and reduce the false alarm rate. Therefore, this study aims to improve generic attack classification by implementing two hybridized decision tree algorithms namely Naive Bayes Decision tree (NBTree) and Logistic Model tree (LMT). The proposed hybridized methods were developed using the 10-fold cross-validation technique to avoid overfitting. The generic attack detector produced a 99.8% accuracy, an FPR score of 0.002 and an MCC score of 0.995. The performances of the proposed methods were better than the existing decision tree method. Similarly, the proposed method outperformed multi-classification methods for detecting generic attacks. Hence, it is recommended to implement hybridized decision tree method for detecting generic attacks on a computer network.