How to stop Abuse?

Hello,
I was just wondering if there’s a quick and easy way to stop some users to abuse my website.
I was looking at the stats today, and some guy was getting 10 hits every 2 seconds.

after a while he had 5k hits. I’m guessing he was trying to get more points or w/e, however my script doesn’t allow that. but I still allow him to open the URL a million times.

I guess i could store the numbre of Hits per IP in a Databsase, and have a CronJob that check every 5 minutes or so, if the IP has been doing WAY too many requests.

is there a better way ?