Botnet network attacks are a growing issue in network security. These types of attacks consist out of compromised devices which are used for malicious activities. Many traditional systems use pre-defined pattern matching methods for detecting network intrusions based on the characteristics of previously seen attacks. This means that previously unseen attacks often go unnoticed as they do not have the patterns that the traditional systems are looking for. This paper proposes an anomaly detection approach which doesn’t use the characteristics of known attacks in order to detect new ones, instead it looks for anomalous events which deviate from the normal. The approach uses Word2Vec, a neural network model used in the field of Natural Language Processing and applies it to NetFlow data in order to produce meaningful representations of network features. These representations together with statistical features are then fed into an Autoencoder model which attempts to reconstruct the NetFlow data, where poor reconstructions could indicate anomalous data. The approach was evaluated on multiple different flow-based network datasets and the results show that the approach has potential for botnet detection, where the reconstructions can be used as metrics for finding botnet events. However, the results vary for different datasets and performs poorly as a botnet detector for some datasets, indicating that further investigation is required before real world use.