<![CDATA[The rapid digital transformation of critical infrastructure has significantly increased its exposure to complex and continuously evolving cyber threats, creating an urgent need for intelligent and adaptive cybersecurity solutions. Conventional security mechanisms, such as signature-based and rule-based intrusion detection systems, often struggle to identify novel attack patterns and provide timely responses to emerging threats. To address these limitations, this study proposes an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven framework for cyber threat detection and automated response that strengthens the security, resilience, and operational reliability of critical infrastructure environments. The experimental evaluation demonstrates that AI-based techniques substantially outperform traditional cybersecurity methods in terms of detection performance. Conventional rule-based systems achieve an average detection accuracy of approximately 68%, whereas machine learning and deep learning models improve the accuracy to nearly 80% and 88%, respectively. The proposed AI-driven framework delivers the highest performance, achieving an overall detection accuracy of approximately 94%. This superior performance highlights its capability to accurately identify both previously known attacks and sophisticated zero-day threats. Beyond detection accuracy, the study evaluates response time, which plays a crucial role in limiting the impact of cyber incidents. The findings reveal that the proposed AI-enabled response mechanism reduces the average response time to approximately 35 seconds, compared with around 150 seconds for manual response processes and 90 seconds for conventional rule-based automation. Such improvements enable faster threat containment, minimize operational disruption, and enhance the resilience of critical infrastructure systems. The framework also demonstrates notable improvements in reducing false positive alerts. The AI-driven approach achieves a false positive rate of approximately 5%, significantly lower than the 20% observed in signature-based systems and the 12% reported for anomaly-based detection methods. By minimizing false alarms, the proposed framework improves the efficiency of security operations, reduces alert fatigue among cybersecurity analysts, and enables security teams to prioritize genuine threats more effectively.]]>
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