Posted by Steve on Sun 17 Jul 2005 at 00:39
The iptables firewall has several useful extension modules which can be used to in addition to the basic firewall functionality. One of the more interesting of these extensions is the "recent" module which allows you to match recent connections, and perform simple throttling on incoming connections.
We've previously described keeping SSH access secure by limiting which users can connect, or just firewalling access so that only a small list of trusted IP addresses can connect. In most cases this is sufficient to protect your system.