This paper employs an audit bit based mechanism to mitigate the effect of Byzantine attacks. In this framework, the optimal attacking strategy for intelligent attackers is investigated for the traditional audit bit based scheme (TAS) to evaluate the robustness of the system. We show that it is possible for an intelligent attacker to degrade the performance of TAS to the system without audit bits. To enhance the robustness of the system in the presence of intelligent attackers, we propose an enhanced audit bit based scheme (EAS). The optimal fusion rule for the proposed scheme is derived and the detection performance of the system is evaluated via the probability of error for the system. Simulation results show that the proposed EAS improves the robustness and the detection performance of the system. Moreover, based on EAS, another new scheme called the reduced audit bit based scheme (RAS) is proposed which further improves system performance. We derive the new optimal fusion rule and the simulation results show that RAS outperforms EAS and TAS in terms of both robustness and detection performance of the system. Then, we extend the proposed RAS for a wide-area cluster based distributed wireless sensor networks (CWSNs). Simulation results show that the proposed RAS significantly reduces the communication overhead between the sensors and the FC, which prolongs the lifetime of the network.