A malicious anchor node detection and target node localization method based on recovery of sparse terms, includes: S1: establishing an unknown disturbance term by using ranging value attack terms from an attacker to nodes in a wireless sensor network, and introducing a to-be-estimated location of a target node to the unknown disturbance term, to obtain an unknown sparse vector; S2: converting a problem of malicious anchor node detection and target node localization into a problem of recovery of the unknown sparse vector; S3: determining a location of an initial node according to a recursive weighted linear least square method, and recovering and reconstructing the unknown sparse vector with sparsity; and S4: determining a malicious anchor node determination range by approximating a threshold using a recovered value of the unknown sparse vector, to implement malicious anchor node detection, and recovering and determining location information of the target node.