With the growth of the Internet and its potential, more and more people are getting connected to the Internet every day to take advantage of the e-Commerce. On one side, the Internet brings in tremendous potential to business in terms of reaching the end users. At the same time it also brings in lot of security risk to the business over the network. With the growth of cyber-attacks, information safety has become an important issue all over the world. Intrusion detection systems (IDSs) are an essential element for network security infrastructure and play a very important role in detecting large number of attacks. This survey paper introduces a detailed analysis of the network security problems and also represents a review of the current research. The main aim of the paper is to finds out the problem associated with network security for that various existing approaches related to intrusion detection and preventions are discussed. This survey focuses on presenting the different issues that must be addressed to build fully functional and practically usable intrusion detection systems (IDSs). It points out the state of the art in each area and suggests important open research issues.

network security, intrusion detection system, cyber attacks, intrusion prevention system, data security, artificial neural networks, computer network, soft computing, swarm intelligence, fuzzy system