Like everybody who has a Linux server running an SSH daemon connected to the Internet, I regularly get attacked by people (well, botnets probably) trying to do a brute-force attack against the server. Such attempts can take many hours, during which they simply try many thousands of possible username/password combinations.
As long as you have your SSH server configured properly, the most important thing being to only allow SSH access to accounts which actually need it, this is more an annoyance than a problem. Nonetheless, it is an annoyance, if only because of all the crap in your logfiles.
There are many ways to detect and block such attacks. sshdfilter works well, and a good detailed overview of the various options can be found here. One that particularly appealed to me, however, was a very simple netfilter-based technique consisting of only two lines of iptables code. It uses the recent netfilter extension, and the idea of using it to combat SSH attacks was apparently first conceived by Andrew Pollock.
