Too many ways to list here, and implementation details will depend on your hosting environment and other requirements. But my quick-and-dirty trick involves a single URL which, when visited, runs a script which appends "deny from foo" (where foo is the naughty IP address) to my .htaccess file. The URL in question is not publicly listed, so nobody will accidentally stumble upon it and accidentally ban themselves. It's also specifically disallowed in robots.txt, so in theory it will only be visited by bad bots.
Another related idea: use fail2ban to monitor the server access logs. There is one filter that will ban hosts that request non-existent URLs like WordPress login and other PHP files. If your server is not hosting PHP at all it's an obvious sign that the requests are from bots that are probing maliciously.
Too many ways to list here, and implementation details will depend on your hosting environment and other requirements. But my quick-and-dirty trick involves a single URL which, when visited, runs a script which appends "deny from foo" (where foo is the naughty IP address) to my .htaccess file. The URL in question is not publicly listed, so nobody will accidentally stumble upon it and accidentally ban themselves. It's also specifically disallowed in robots.txt, so in theory it will only be visited by bad bots.
Another related idea: use fail2ban to monitor the server access logs. There is one filter that will ban hosts that request non-existent URLs like WordPress login and other PHP files. If your server is not hosting PHP at all it's an obvious sign that the requests are from bots that are probing maliciously.