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The ubiquity of the Internet plays a pivotal role in connecting individuals and facilitating easy access to various essential services. As of 2022, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) reports that approximately 5.3 billion people are connected to the internet, underscoring its widespread coverage and indispensability in our daily lives. This expansive coverage enables a myriad of services, including communication, e-banking, e-commerce, online social security access, medical reporting, education, entertainment, weather information, traffic monitoring, online surveys, and more. However, this open platform also exposes vulnerabilities to malicious users who actively seek to exploit weaknesses in the virtual domain, aiming to gain credentials, financial benefits, or reveal critical information through the use of malware. This constant threat poses a serious challenge in safeguarding sensitive information in cyberspace. To address this challenge, we propose the use of ensemble and deep neural network (DNN) based machine learning (ML) techniques to detect malicious intent packets before they can infiltrate or compromise systems and applications. Attackers employ various tactics to evade existing security systems, such as antivirus or intrusion detection systems, necessitating a robust defense mechanism. Our approach involves implementing an ensemble, a collection of diverse classifiers capable of capturing different attack patterns and better generalizing from highly relevant features, thus enhancing protection against a variety of attacks compared to a single classifier. Given the highly unbalanced dataset, the ensemble classifier effectively addresses this condition, and oversampling is also employed to minimize bias toward the majority class. To prevent overfitting, we utilize Random Forest (RF) and the dropout technique in the DNN. Furthermore, we introduce a DNN to assess its ability to recognize complex attack patterns and variations compared to the ensemble approach. Various metrics, such as classification accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, confusion matrix are utilized to measure the performance of our proposed system, with the aim of outperforming current state-of-the-art intrusion detection systems.