This study presents an intrusion detection system (IDS) model utilizing a random forest algorithm on the NSL-KDD dataset, addressing the challenges of big data and class imbalances through the synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE). The IDS-RF model achieved high performance metrics, outperforming other machine learning classifiers like support vector machine and k-nearest neighbor. The research highlights the importance of integrating big data techniques and machine learning to enhance the accuracy and efficiency of intrusion detection systems.