SSH and Protecting SSH from Hackers

I found this useful tidbit in one of Chess Griffin's Linux Reality forums...

On episode 37 Chess discussed ssh and in paticular "changing the port number of ssh to something beside port 22. Though this might stop some of the casual thugs from trying to crack your system, it isn't that hard to scan and find out the port that you have chosen to move ssh to. Another way would be to use a program called DenyHosts which scans the auth.log file and than adds all ip(s) that scans your ssh to the hosts.deny file. Their website is http://denyhosts.sourceforge.net/ It is extremely easy to configure and can be configured to suite almost any needs or wants."

I wanted to hold onto this for when I decide to open my SSH port for remote access.

Another interesting article... SSH dynamic port forwarding with SOCKS