Description:
<jats:p>With the widespread adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) technology, the increasing number of IoT devices has led to a rise in serious network security issues. Botnets, a major threat in network security, have garnered significant attention over the past decade. However, detecting these rapidly evolving botnets remains a challenge, with current detection accuracy being relatively low. Therefore, this study focuses on designing efficient botnet detection models to enhance detection performance. This paper improves the initial population generation strategy of the Dung Beetle Optimizer (DBO) by using the centroid opposition-based learning strategy instead of the original random generation strategy. The improved DBO is applied to optimize Catboost parameters and is employed in the field of IoT botnet detection. Performance comparison experiments are conducted using real-world IoT traffic datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms other models in terms of accuracy and F1 score, indicating the effectiveness of the proposed approach in this field.</jats:p>