The process of scanning the events occurring in a computer system or network and analyzing them for warning of intrusions is known as intrusion detection system (IDS). This paper presents a new intrusion detection system based on tabu search based fuzzy system. Here, we use tabu search algorithm to effectively explore and exploit the large state space associated with intrusion detection as a complicated classification problem. Experiments were performed on KDD-Cup99 data set which has information about intrusive and normal behaviors on computer networks. Results show that the proposed method obtains notable accuracy and lower cost in comparison with several renowned algorithms.