Technological advancements have played a pivotal role in the rapid proliferation of the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) through the deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in large numbers. COVID-19 caused serious disruptions across many industries with lockdowns and travel restrictions imposed across the globe. As a result, conducting business as usual became increasingly untenable, necessitating the adoption of new approaches in the workplace. For instance, virtual doctor consultations, remote learning, and virtual private network (VPN) connections for employees working from home became more prevalent. This paradigm shift has brought about positive benefits, however, it has also increased the attack vectors and surface, creating lucrative opportunities for cyber-attacks. Consequently, more sophisticated attacks have emerged, including Botnet attacks which typically lead to Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS). These pose a serious threat to businesses and organisations worldwide. This paper proposes a system for detecting malicious activities in network traffic using sequential pattern mining (SPM) techniques. The proposed approach utilises SPM as an unsupervised learning technique to extract intrinsic communication patterns from network traffic, enabling the discovery of rules for detecting malicious activities and generating security alerts accordingly. By leveraging this approach, businesses and organisations can enhance the security of their networks, detect malicious activities including emerging ones, and thus respond proactively to potential threats. The performance evaluation for the proposed approach reveals a True Positive Rate (TPR) of over 99% and a False Positive Rate (FPR) of 0%.

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