Many would just do it as a challenge, Yes they are being a asshat, but they just don't realise that.

> they just don't realise that

Their parents didn't raise them very well if they don't realize that denying access to an important resource to tons of people is really, really lame.

great advertising for DDoS protection services.

Considering that Prolexic isn't exactly keeping Github up, not really!

I've heard about organised crime doing this sort of thing and asking for payment to stop.

Happened to 'The Million Dollar Homepage'[1].

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage#DDo...

Agreed... but sites like these are probably targets for a bunch of reasons... http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/02/dev-site-behind-appl...

The problem is, even just being an asshat is enough problem if there are enough of them.

Mozilla has had the same issue: every so often someone tries to DDoS bugzilla.mozilla.org, causing it to get all slow and hard to use. :(

Seeing how many people (ab)use github as a free file/web hosting service for various crap, it is strange we don't see such attacks more often.

As in, "oops I typed in the wrong address for my botnet and didn't notice for two hours" ?