The ongoing decarbonisation of modern electricity systems has led to a substantial increase of operational uncertainty, particularly due to the large-scale integration of renewable energy generation. However, the expanding space of possible operating points renders necessary the development of novel security assessment approaches. In this paper we focus on the use of security rules, where classifiers are trained offline to characterize previously unseen points as safe or unsafe. This paper proposes a novel deep learning-based feature extraction framework for building security rules. We show how deep autoencoders can be used to transform the space of conventional state variables (e.g. power flows) to a small number of dimensions where we can optimally distinguish between safe and unsafe operation. The proposed framework is data-driven and can be useful in multiple applications within the context of security assessment. To achieve high accuracy, a novel objective-based loss function is proposed to address the issue of imbalanced safe/unsafe classes that characterizes electricity system operation. Furthermore, an R-vine copula-based model is proposed to sample historical data and generate large populations of anticipated system states for training. The superior performance of the proposed framework is demonstrated through a series of case studies and comparisons using the load and wind generation data from the French transmission system, which have been mapped to the IEEE 118-bus system.