There are many servers using tools like
fail2ban,
denyhosts or
blockhosts to defend their machine from different
brute force attacks especially on ssh.
It is old news that this can lead to dangerous results because of stuff like
IP spoofing.
The following paper on
http://www.ossec.net/en/attacking-loganalysis.html which came across full-disclosure today shows how to do
DoS attacks on a server running these tools using a technique very similar to
SQL injections, called
log injection.
This shows another time that it might be very self-desctructive if you use such tools.
So if you use one of the services,
patch them, this attack can be run by everyone capable of open a shell and use netcat/telnet/foo.