Journal of Cybersecurity and Information Management JCIM 2690-6775 2769-7851 10.54216/JCIM https://www.americaspg.com/journals/show/1136 2019 2019 Department of Engineering and Computer Science Mohammed. Mohammed. College of Computer Science and Information Technology Abeer. Y. Salawi Al-Baha University, Al-Baha City, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Salwa. H. Alghamdi Software defined networks (SDN) remain a hot research field as it provides controllable networking operations. The SDN controller can be treated as the operating system of the SDN model and it holds the responsibility of performing different networking applications. Despite the benefits of SDN, security remains a challenging problem. At the same time, distributed denial of services (DDoS) is a typical attack on SDN owing to centralized architecture, especially at the control layer of the SDN. This article develops a new Cat Swarm Optimization with Fuzzy Rule Base Classification (CSO-FRBCC) model for cybersecurity in SDN. The presented CSO-FRBCC model intends to effectually categorize the occurrence of DDoS attacks in SDN. To achieve this, the CSO-FRBCC model primarily pre-processes the input data to transform it to a uniform format. Besides, the CSO-FRBCC model employs FRBCC classifier for the recognition and classification of intrusions. Moreover, the parameter optimization of the FRBCC classification model is adjusted by the use of cat swarm optimization (CSO) algorithm which results in improved performance. A comprehensive set of simulations were carried out on benchmark dataset and the results highlighted the enhanced outcomes of the CSO-FRBCC model over the other recent approaches. 2022 2022 08 17 10.54216/JCIM.0100101 https://www.americaspg.com/articleinfo/2/show/1136