*Article* **Botnet Detection Employing a Dilated Convolutional Autoencoder Classifier with the Aid of Hybrid Shark and Bear Smell Optimization Algorithm-Based Feature Selection in FANETs**

**Nejood Faisal Abdulsattar 1, Firas Abedi 2, Hayder M. A. Ghanimi 3, Sachin Kumar 4,\*, Ali Hashim Abbas 1,\*, Ali S. Abosinnee 5, Ahmed Alkhayyat 6, Mustafa Hamid Hassan <sup>1</sup> and Fatima Hashim Abbas <sup>7</sup>**


**Abstract:** Flying ad hoc networks (FANETs) or drone technologies have attracted great focus recently because of their crucial implementations. Hence, diverse research has been performed on establishing FANET implementations in disparate disciplines. Indeed, civil airspaces have progressively embraced FANET technology in their systems. Nevertheless, the FANETs' distinct characteristics can be tuned and reinforced for evolving security threats (STs), specifically for intrusion detection (ID). In this study, we introduce a deep learning approach to detect botnet threats in FANET. The proposed approach uses a hybrid shark and bear smell optimization algorithm (HSBSOA) to extract the essential features. This hybrid algorithm allows for searching different feature solutions within the search space regions to guarantee a superior solution. Then, a dilated convolutional autoencoder classifier is used to detect and classify the security threats. Some of the most common botnet attacks use the N-BaIoT dataset, which automatically learns features from raw data to capture a malicious file. The proposed framework is named the hybrid shark and bear smell optimized dilated convolutional autoencoder (HSBSOpt\_DCA). The experiments show that the proposed approach outperforms existing models such as CNN-SSDI, BI-LSTM, ODNN, and RPCO-BCNN. The proposed HSBSOpt\_DCA can achieve improvements of 97% accuracy, 89% precision, 98% recall, and 98% F1-score as compared with those existing models.

**Keywords:** FANETs; intrusion detection; botnet attack; deep neural network; feature selection; optimization
