The idea of denying access to SSH servers is nothing new and I was inspired by many other scripts that I discovered. However, none of them did things the way I envisioned them to. Also, they were all shell scripts which do not offer the elegance of Python.
Denyhosts provides SSH attack prevention and is used by thousands of users worldwide.
The old website hasn't been updated since years. Check out the newer Denyhosts 3 at Github.