brute force/dictionary attacks

[Al - Image Hosting Services <azick%zickswebventures.com@localhost>]

Hi,

I am running NetBSd 4 with UW ipop3d. Anyway, I am getting more and more 
brute force attacks with pop. What happens is that after inetd reaches 
the set limit of connections it stops all pop3 requests, so the pop server 
is effectively down. I put the IP address in hosts.deny, but inetd still 
reached its limit and stopped taking requests for pop. I then raised the 
limit of connections to 999. This created a new issue and although the 
server continued to answer pop requests its cpu was 0% idle.

Does anyone know if there is a way to hold the connection open with the 
pop3 client much like is done with smtp (tar pit) or if I could limit the 
number of SYN packets? I would like to do something to slow them down.
Maybe someone has a better suggestion on how to deal with this kind of 
attack.

Thanks,
Al