This paper proposes a novel scheme that uses robust principal component classifier in intrusion detection problem where the training data may be unsupervised. Assuming that anomalies can be treated as outliers, an intrusion predictive model is constructed from the major and minor principal components of normal instances. A measure of the difference of an anomaly from the normal instance is the distance in the principal component space. The distance based on the major components that account for 50% of the total variation and the minor components with eigenvalues less than 0.20 is shown to work well. The experiments with KDD Cup 1999 data demonstrate that our proposed method achieves 98.94% in recall and 97.89% in precision with the false alarm rate 0.92% and outperforms the nearest neighbor method, density-based local outliers (LOF) approach, and the outlier detection algorithms based on Canberra metric.