Hi,
Have had many sort of attacks from China, Brazil, and eastern Europe.
I use IPTables to block some countries completely. I get a master list from:
http://www.wizcrafts.net/chinese-iptables-blocklist.html for example...
Once I get their list I put it into a script file and run it on the server. Something like this:
#!/bin/bash
# china blocklist
# generated from http://blacklists.linuxadmin.org
/sbin/iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -s 58.14.0.0/15 --dport 22 -j REJECT
/sbin/iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -s 58.16.0.0/13 --dport 22 -j REJECT
/sbin/iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -s 58.24.0.0/15 --dport 22 -j REJECT
A few other things is I move my default SSH port. This helps tremendously. On my server it is controlled in the file /etc/ssh/sshd_config
I changed or added this line. Except I used my secret numbers. These are not the actual numbers I used.
You may also want to consider moving your FTP ports as well. You can also do port scans against your server to see what is obviously visible to a hacker. There are tools for that at Sourceforge.net