Dealing with unwelcome visitors

[Ted Roche]

I have a FC2 machine exposed to the Internet, supporting web, ftp, ssh 
and a few other functions. Each day I read the logs and see one or two 
visitors trying to log into ssh as "admin", "guest", "test" and "user" 
with one try each with a password and one without. The IP address is 
always different, but the fact that the pattern of names and attempts 
is always the same suggests script kiddies.

I manually add the IP address to an iptables chain so that all future 
packets from that address are dropped.

For a while, i was looking up the addresses and sending email to their 
local abuse@ website, but that got to be too much work.

Anyone have a suggestion re:

1) are these appropriate actions to take?
2) is there any easier way to do it?
3) is there something else I ought to be doing?

Ted Roche
Ted Roche & Associates, LLC
http://www.tedroche.com