In recent years, network traffic data have become larger and more complex, leading to higher possibilities of network intrusion. Traditional intrusion detection methods face difficulty in processing high-speed network data and cannot detect currently unknown attacks. Therefore, this paper proposes a network attack detection method combining a flow calculation and deep learning. The method consists of two parts: A real-Time detection algorithm based on flow calculations and frequent patterns and a classification algorithm based on the deep belief network and support vector machine ( DBN-SVM ). Sliding window ( SW ) stream data processing enables real-Time detection, and the DBN-SVM algorithm can improve classification accuracy. Finally, to verify the proposed method, a system is implemented. Based on the CICIDS2017 open source data set, a series of comparative experiments are conducted. The method's real-Time detection efficiency is higher than that of traditional machine learning algorithms. The attack classification accuracy is 0.7 percentage points higher than that of a DBN, which is 2 percentage points higher than that of the integrated algorithm boosting and bagging methods. Hence, it is suitable for the real-Time detection of high-speed network intrusions. © 2014 Chinese Association of Automation.