Wireless ad hoc network is an emerging technology that is gaining popularity as a cost-effective way of offering end-to-end services, such as Internet access, in an inexpensive, practical, and fast manner. However, wireless ad hoc networks are particularly vulnerable to extern and insider attacks due to their very intrinsic nature such as shared wireless medium and decentralized architecture. In this paper, we present a distributed intrusion detection approach, which is based on exchange of events and cooperation between the participating nodes. The proposed mechanism relies on non-intrusive traffic monitoring at each node, which generates network events. These events are processed by the intrusion detection system that is able to instantly signalize malicious activities, for instance, a node disseminating fake routing information through the network. We demonstrate the approach efficiency for detecting misbehaving nodes through a virtualized network environment that consists of virtual nodes interconnected which represent the network topology.