The row was inserted at TCP accept with a provisional AUTH_FAILED, so the kubelet's TCP readiness probe on the SFTP port wrote a "failed sign-in" row every 5 seconds per pod in kof22 prod (about 35k a day). The row is now written at the first authentication attempt or a pre-auth refusal (the connection rate limit); probes and port scans leave nothing. The per-IP connection rate is still counted at accept. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>