With the ever-expanding ubiquity of the Internet, wireless networks have permeated every facet of modern life, escalating concerns surrounding network security for users. Consequently, the demand for a robust Intrusion Detection System (IDS) has surged. The IDS serves as a critical bastion within the security framework, a significance further magnified in wireless networks where intrusions may stem from the deluge of sensor data. This influx of data, however, inevitably taxes the efficiency and computational speed of IDS. To address these limitations, numerous strategies for enhancing IDS performance have been posited by researchers. This paper introduces a novel feature selection method grounded in Support Vector Machine (SVM) and harnessing the innovative modified Aquila Optimizer (mAO) for Intrusion Detection Systems in Wireless Sensor Networks. To evaluate the efficacy of our approach, we employed the KDD'99 dataset for testing and benchmarking against established methods. Multiple performance metrics, including accuracy, detection rate, false alarm rate, feature count, and execution time, were utilized for assessment. Our comparative analysis reveals the superiority of the proposed method, with standout results in terms of feature reduction, detection accuracy, and false alarm mitigation, yielding significant improvements of 11%, 98.76%, and 0.02%, respectively.