With the increasing amount of reliance on digital data and computer networks
by corporations and the public in general, the occurrence of cyber attacks has
become a great threat to the normal functioning of our society. Intrusion
detection systems seek to address this threat by preemptively detecting attacks
in real time while attempting to block them or minimizing their damage. These
systems can function in many ways being some of them based on artificial
intelligence methods. Datasets containing both normal network traffic and cyber
attacks are used for training these algorithms so that they can learn the
underlying patterns of network-based data. The CIDDS-001 is one of the most
used datasets for network-based intrusion detection research. Regarding this
dataset, in the majority of works published so far, the Class label was used
for training machine learning algorithms. However, there is another label in
the CIDDS-001, AttackType, that seems very promising for this purpose and
remains considerably unexplored. This work seeks to make a comparison between
two machine learning models, K-Nearest Neighbours and Random Forest, which were
trained with both these labels in order to ascertain whether AttackType can
produce reliable results in comparison with the Class label.