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Feature Selection (FS) is critically important for optimising the performance of Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) used in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). However, selecting an optimal number of relevant features from massive IDS data sets has been an ongoing FS research problem. Many approaches use Machine Learning (ML), such as nature-inspired population-based and Differential Evolution (DE)-based algorithms for FS. However, the main drawback of DE is that it has a premature convergence issue, which leads to false convergence. In this paper, a novel mutation strategy is proposed to alleviate premature convergence and to develop a modified DE-based FS algorithm called DE with maturity extension (DE-ME). The novel mutation is achieved by changing the mutation factor in the DE\rnd\1 based on K-Nearest Neighbour (KNN) as the most efficient implementation without adding further complexity to the design process. The proposed DE-ME algorithm improves the FS operation with significant performance improvements in terms of overcoming premature convergence and increasing accuracy for selection. The DE-ME algorithm was used to select the most effective features from 41 features in the Network Security Laboratory Knowledge Discovery in Databases (NSL-KDD) dataset. The accuracy of DE-ME is high at 99.66 %, its False Positive Rate (FPR) is low at 0.464 %, and the true positive rate (TPR) achieved is 99.80 %. In addition, the number of features selected by DE-ME is 6 out of 41 features in the dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]