A mobile Ad Hoc network (MANET) is a dynamic wireless network developed using wireless nodes without using any infrastructures. The wireless nature of mobile networks causes several challenges in secured communication which makes it susceptible to malicious attacks. Therefore, security is a very essential factor in facilitating a secured message transmission among mobile nodes in the wireless medium. The energy and trust aware -multi objective african vultures optimization (ETA-MAVO) method is used in this paper to provide high security for the data packets, thereby preventing malicious attacks. Using the ETA-MAVO algorithm, the network nodes' energy efficiency and trust value are calculated. For choosing the best cluster heads (CHs), ETA-MAVO considers fitness functions, namely: trust value, energy ratio, communication cost, the total number of gateway hops, and network load. To discover malicious nodes in the network and minimize packet loss, the trust value of a node is calculated from its neighbours. Because of trust value, updating routing information is simpler and increases network throughput. The results obtained from the simulation show that the proposed ETA-MAVO achieved better performance with respect to parameters such as delay, energy consumption, throughput, and detection rate when compared with the existing cat slap single-play algorithm (C-SSA) and data-driven zone based routing protocol (DD-ZRP), angular based energy proficient trusted routing (ACEPTR) protocol and aquila optimizer (AO) and puzzle optimization algorithm (POA). The proposed method achieved a detection rate of 93% while the existing C-SSA, DD-ZRP, ACEPTR, AO and POA achieved a detection rate of 90%, 68%, 72%, 91% and 90% respectively.