In "To Serve Man" one of the highlighted demonstrations of the Alien (ahem) benefactors* was a nitrogen-based tech for growing crops... (*I suppose as we would be considered benefactors to our livestock). :-)

You can use tcpwrappers and have fail2ban add ip's to /etc/hosts.deny as well. I use it for dovecot too, and you can even use to block failed http-auth requests and create totally custom jail.conf files...basically, any logfile you want to set up the regex filter conditions for (like mod_sec, and bad-bots in apache). I was using the iptables mode for many of my filters, but now I use the iptables, it's a little easier to manage for me. It'll send you emails too with the ARIN whois output when it blocks an ip....