The main intention of developing cognitive radio technology is to solve the spectrum deficiency problem by allocating the spectrum dynamically to the unlicensed clients. An important aim of any wireless network is to secure communication. It is to help the unlicensed clients to utilize the maximum available licensed bandwidth, and the cognitive network is designed for opportunistic communication technology. Selfish attacks cause serious security problem because they significantly deteriorate the performance of a cognitive network. In this paper, the selfish attacks have been identified using cooperative neighboring cognitive radio ad hoc network (COOPON). A novel technique has been proposed as ICOOPON (improvised COOPON), which shows improved performance in selfish attack detection as compared to existing technique. A comparative study has been presented to find the efficiency of proposed technique. The parameters used are throughput, packet delivery ratio and end to end delay.