In this paper, we use simulated annealing heuristics for constructing an intrusion detection system (IDS). The proposed IDS combines the learning ability of simulated annealing heuristics with the approximate reasoning method of fuzzy systems. The use of simulated annealing is an effort to effectively explore the large search space related to intrusion detection problems, and find the optimum set of fuzzy if-then rules. The aim of this paper is to present the capability of simulated annealing based fuzzy system to deal with intrusion detection classification problem as a new real-world application area. Experiments were performed with KDD-Cup99 intrusion detection benchmark data set.