An intrusion detection system serves as the backbone for providing high-level network security. Different forms of network attacks have been discovered and they continue to become gradually more sophisticated and complicated. With the wide use of internet-based applications, cyber security has become an important research area. Despite the availability of many existing intrusion detection systems, intuitive cybersecurity systems are needed due to alarmingly increasing intrusion attacks. Furthermore, with new intrusion attacks, the efficacy of existing systems depletes unless they evolve. The lack of real datasets adds further difficulties to properly investigating this problem. This study proposes an intrusion detection approach for the modern network environment by considering the data from satellite and terrestrial networks. Incorporating machine learning models, the study proposes an ensemble model RFMLP that integrates random forest (RF) and multilayer perceptron (MLP) for increasing intrusion detection performance. For analyzing the efficiency of the proposed framework, three different datasets are used for experiments and validation, namely KDD-CUP 99, NSL-KDD, and STIN. In addition, performance comparison with state-of-the-art models is performed which suggests that the RFMLP can detect intrusion attacks with high accuracy than the existing approaches.