There's a problem with giving 'value' to aged accounts....
Plenty of 'aged' accounts - i.e. active accounts for years, for various meanings of 'active' get hacked / have credentials dumped, often long after the user who was using them has forgotten about the account too.
To be fair to github - they restored the account, seemingly without any kind of loss to the user other than some time. He's learnt a lesson (don't rely on free services for something so important) and so I'm not really sure why this is even in the news?