So I go into the office this morning and notice my mail is taking a long time to be retrieved.  After like a minute, there appears a thousand messages from the BFD (Brute Force Detection) that IP addresses are being banned for invalid number of incorrect login attempts (hacking into shell).  I have seen such emails before, either they were positive alarms from random hackers or they were a user on the server who was having a really bad day (forgot their login info and tried so many different things until they got banned), but I have never seen anything on this scale before.  Each email notification I received indicates a different IP address that got banned.  All IPs are unique.  BFD is working hard and doing it\'s job; it is at the top of #top processes.
 
So it is safe to say my server is under attack right now.  As far as I can tell, it is not having too much affect.  Web pages are loading a bit slowly, log files are filling up, but that\'s about it.
 
So I guess we just weather the storm here?  How on earth can so many unique IP addresses all be pounding my server\'s sill?  A new breed of hacking software with a database of proxy connections?