The increasing complexity and scale of modern network traffic driven by IoT and cloud-based infrastructures have made accurate intrusion detection a critical challenge. Conventional network intrusion detection systems (NIDS) and many deep learning–based approaches struggle to reliably detect minority and stealthy attacks due to severe class imbalance and limited discrimination of subtle traffic patterns. To address these limitations, this study proposes a hybrid CNN–RBF–Attention framework for network intrusion detection. The proposed model integrates three complementary components: (i) a convolutional neural network for hierarchical feature extraction from network flow data, (ii) a radial basis function (RBF) network for localized nonlinear classification using prototype-based decision regions, and (iii) an attention mechanism that adaptively weights RBF activations to emphasize discriminative traffic patterns. SMOTE is applied exclusively to the training data to mitigate class imbalance. The framework is evaluated on the widely used CICIDS2017 and CICIDS2018 benchmark datasets in both binary and multiclass settings, using recall, precision, F1-score, confusion matrices, and ROC analysis. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed hybrid model consistently outperforms standalone CNN and RBF baselines, particularly in terms of recall and F1-score. On the CICIDS2018 dataset, the model achieves 99.81% accuracy and 99.81% F1-score in binary classification, and 99.54% accuracy and 99.54% F1-score in multiclass classification. On CICIDS2017, it achieves 98.12% accuracy and 98.12% F1-score in binary classification, and 98.92% accuracy and 98.92% F1-score in multiclass classification. Confusion matrix and ROC analyses further show strong class separability and reliable performance in low–false-positive-rate regions, which is critical for real-world IDS deployment. These results confirm that combining deep hierarchical feature learning, localized prototype-based classification, and attention-guided refinement yields a robust, operationally reliable intrusion detection framework for highly imbalanced network environments.