Cyber Attacks Detection in IoT Networks Using a Distributed Inflated-Mask Encoder-Only Informer Model

The number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has been growing rapidly, driven by the demand for low-cost and low-power devices across a wide range of industrial and consumer applications. This expansion has broadened the attack surface exposed to cyber threats, making the detection of malicious activity in the IoT infrastructure a pressing research challenge. Most existing approaches are limited to binary anomaly detection, rely on a single data modality, or incur a computational overhead incompatible with realistic deployment on the edge. This paper introduces the Multi-modal Universal Informer Convolutional Neural Network (MUI-CNN) Classifier, a distributed architecture for multi-class attack detection across heterogeneous IoT sensor and network environments. It combines four components - a multi-modal universal data embedding layer that unifies numerical, categorical, and temporal features into a shared spatio-temporal representation, a CNN local pattern recognition layer, an encoder-only classifier for long-term temporal dependencies, and an optional statistical masking layer for greater sensitivity to low-amplitude signatures. The model is evaluated on the Telecommunication Operating Systems (OS) and Network Internet of Things (TON-IoT) dataset covering eight sensor types and ten attack classes. Results demonstrate F1 above 88% on all IoT sensors and up to 94.85% on the network sensor, confirming that each architectural component contributes a measurable and distinct improvement over partial baselines.