[brobinson]

You should be using public key authentication: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-...

If you insist on using passwords, make sure you at least install something like fail2ban or denyhosts to block the compromised machines which are hammering your server trying to guess passwords. Clients can see which authentication methods are allowed so they know which machines to attack (i.e., yours, if you allow passwords).

[MertsA]

Or for something even cleaner than a program trying to parse plaintext logs you can use a PAM module. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pam_abl

[adfskjldsjfk]

How would you compare it with fail2ban?