ABSTRACT
The botnet have developed into a severe risk to Internet of Things (IoT) systems as a result of manufacturers ‘insufficient security policies and end users' lack of security awareness. By default, several ports are open and user credentials are left unmodified. ML and DL strategies have been suggested in numerous latest research for identifying and categorising botnet assaults in the IoT context, but still, it has a few issues like high error susceptibility, working only with a large amount of data, poor quality, and data acquisition. This research provided use of a brand-new IoT botnet detector built on an improved hybrid classifier. The proposed work's main components are "pre-processing, feature extraction, feature selection, and attack detection." Following that, the improved Information Gain (IIG) model is used to choose the most reliable characteristics from the received information. To detect an attack, a hybrid classifier is utilized which can be constructed by integrating the optimized Bi-GRU with the Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). To increase the detection accuracy of IoT-BOTNETS, a novel hybrid optimization approach called SMIE (Slime Mould with Immunity Evolution) is created by conceptually integrating two conventional optimization modes: Coronavirus herd immunity optimizer (CHIO) and the Slime mould algorithm. The final output of the hybrid classifier displays the presence or absence of IoT-BOTNET attacks. The projected model's accuracy is 97%, which is 22.6%, 18.5%, 27.8%, 22.6%, and 24.8% higher than the previous models like GWO+ HC, SSO+ HC, WOA+ HC, SMA+ HC, and CHIO+ HC, respectively.