Abstract-In today's digitized world, people rely heavily on numerous smart machines to perform everyday tasks. The number of smart devices has surged recently, leading to an increase in security vulnerabilities. Among these, the "Low-rate denial of service (LDoS)" attack stands out as particularly dangerous due to its stealthy and varied nature, posing significant challenges for current intrusion detection systems. This research introduces a hybrid approach to investigate LDoS attack features, combining hyperparameter optimization (HPO) with principal component analysis (PCA). To address dataset imbalance, the SMOTE technique is applied. PCA is used for dimensionality reduction, with the key hyperparameter 'n_components' optimized through HPO. The study utilizes the 'CICIDS2017' dataset, highlighting the importance of dimension reduction for improved performance. The hybrid method, termed HPO-S-PCA, is employed to analyze LDoS traffic features and extract relevant features. Using these extracted features, machine learning classifiers such as 'Logistic Regression (LR)', 'Support Vector Machine (SVM)', 'Decision Tree (DT)', 'Random Forest (RF)', 'K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN)', 'Kernel SVM', and 'Naive Bayes (NB)' were trained to detect LDoS attacks. Among these, SVM and KNN classifiers achieved more than 99.5% detection rate for positive anomalies. K-Nearest Neighbors outperforms all. The research observed a trade-off between True Positive Rate (TPR) and accuracy in existing studies and focused on enhancing both performance metrics through the novel hybrid approach.