Detection of evolving cyber attacks is a challenging task for conventional network intrusion detection techniques. Various supervised machine learning algorithms have been implemented in network intrusion detection systems. However, traditional algorithms require long training time and have high computational complexity. Therefore, we propose detection of denial of service cyber attacks in communication networks by employing the broad learning system (BLS) that requires shorter training time while achieving comparable performance. Because designing effective detection systems relies on training and test datasets that contain anomalous network traffic data, in this paper we evaluate the performance of various BLS models by using recently generated network intrusion datasets. The best accuracy and F-Score were often achieved using BLS with cascades while BLS with incremental learning usually required shorter training time.