Aiming at the problem of protection failure caused by abnormal intelligent terminals in active distribution network, an adaptive protection method for distribution network with abnormal intelligent terminals is proposed. This method judges the on-off of the switch and the running state of each smart terminal unit (STU) according to the measured switching and current of each STU. An adaptive protection scheme and criterion suitable for line and ring network cabinet are designed. In the case of abnormal STU, the traditional regional protection and adaptive protection are analyzed respectively. The method proposed in this paper is verified by PSCAD simulation software. The results show that the method can effectively deal with the protection failure caused by STU abnormality.