yes, all connections

things like scp and rsync recycle connections across files though, so it hasn't been a problem in practice; ansible does too if you use openssh instead of paramiko

ps -- if someone knows iptables well, and is willing to share a similar script for failed connections, I would be grateful! But doing this across all ssh connections was easy enough that even I managed to get it working.

I'm talking about have a shell script like:

  while whatever ; do
    # hit host with a ssh command numerous times in loop
    ssh user@host command ...
    ...
  done

Banning more than X failed connection attempts from an IP in Y minutes is done with utilities like fail2ban, which wheedle that information from system logs.