The Internet has become an important part of many people’s daily activities. Therefore, numerous attacks threaten Internet users. IDS is a network intrusion detection tool used to quickly identify and categorize intrusions, attacks, or security issues in network-level and host-level infrastructure. Although much research has been done to improve IDS performance, many key issues remain. IDSs need to be able to more accurately detect different types of intrusions with fewer false alarms and other challenges. In this paper, we attempt to improve the performance of IDS using Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA). The results are compared with other algorithms. NSL-KDD dataset is used to evaluate and compare the results. K-means clustering was chosen for pre-processing after a comparison between some of the existing classifier algorithms. The proposed method has proven to be a competitive method in terms of detection rate and false alarm rate base on a comparison with some of the other existing methods.
