"The TIC initiative is about closing down external access points so that you can then monitor traffic in a way that allows you to take more strategic [actions to protect federal networks against threats]," she said.

The model would be similar to the one in existence across Department of Defense networks, Evans said. "The DoD works as a single enterprise. They manage their network as a corporate asset and they do things in accordance with a framework" that is consistent across the .mil domain she said.

"They have been working on this for several years. They know where their external access points or so they are monitoring them," in better fashion than civilian agencies are, she said.

As a result, DoD networks are better prepared and equipped to respond in a more coordinated fashion to attacks of the sort witnessed this week, she said. Evans said that after this week's attacks it won't be surprising at all if more agencies move faster to the TIC model than they have been.

"TIC offers a capability to immediately block those offending IP addresses that are launching an attack," said Patricia Titus, former chief information security officer at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), who now holds a similar job at Unisys Corp.

But a lot will depend on how securely it is architected, Titus said. A major component of TIC is a federal network monitoring technology called Einstein that is designed to capture anomalous network activity and flag suspicious behavior in near real-time.

If this component is not well implemented, the network access point consolidation could end up giving attackers a central point to go after federal systems, she said. But she added it is "very unlikely" that such an implementation error would be allowed to happen. "The government has put out a very careful thought out architecture. This is something they are definitely paying attention to."

Details on the consolidated access points will also not be publicly published making them harder to find and therefore to attack, Evans said.

This week's attacks show how federal agencies continue to remain vulnerable to network threats despite having relatively sophisticated, well-funded and well-staffed security operations, said Amit Yoran, former director of the National Cybersecurity Division at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

"If this can happen to organizations such as the ones affected, it certainly can happen to people downstream as well," said Yoran, who is now CEO of security vendor NetWitness Corp. The attacks show the need for organizations to centralize security policy and enable persistent monitoring of network ingress and egress points in the manner being contemplated by TIC, Yoran said.