This study presents an intrusion detection model using a random forest classifier on the NSL-KDD dataset, addressing challenges in cybersecurity caused by big data. The model employs the Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) to tackle class imbalances and is evaluated against other models including Support Vector Machine and K-Nearest Neighbors. Results indicate the IDS-RF model achieves superior performance across multiple classification metrics for detecting various attack types.