The vital role that cybersecurity plays in protecting our privacy, rights, freedoms, and everything up to and including our physical safety will be more prominent than ever during 2020. More and more of our vital infrastructure is coming online and vulnerable to digital attacks, data breaches involving the leak of personal information are becoming more frequent and bigger, and there's an increasing awareness of political interference and state-sanctioned cyberattacks. The importance of cybersecurity is undoubtedly a growing matter of public concern. We put our faith in technology to solve many of the problems we are facing, both on a global and personal scale. But as the world becomes increasingly connected, the opportunities for bad guys to take advantage for profit or political ends inevitably increases.

A recent Computerworld poll about #technology trends for 2020 found 43.9% of people are most looking forward to #AI-enhanced #cybersecurity. It's no wonder, considering increases in the number of cybersecurity incidents. In 2019, at least 5.3 billion records, including credit card numbers, home addresses and phone numbers, were exposed through data breaches. Organizations need help identifying threats and preventing breaches, and given the shortage of cybersecurity professionals, AI can help them bridge that skills gap. "Look for AI and ML to be used to detect threats and other potentially malicious attacks and for AI to be used with multi-factor authentication (MFA) to provide access to users", Schott Schober, a cybersecurity and wireless expert.

The global IoT healthcare market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 29.9% to reach $322.2 billion by 2025. This can be attributed to the fact that this technology has tremendous potential to transform healthcare operations and efficiencies, including patient care and operational workflows. While it is still at a developing stage, and may have its fair share of obstacles, it is revolutionizing the entire healthcare industry in many ways. Virtual assistants are commonplace in our everyday life with Siri, Alexa, Google Home being the forerunners. The same technology i.e., conversation-based assistance using AI is also used in the healthcare sector for increasing patient engagement.

President Trump told Fox News' "The Ingraham Angle" in an exclusive interview Friday that he believes Iraq should pay back the United States for its investments in the country over the past several years or the American military will "stay there." "I said, 'If we leave, you got to pay us,'" Trump told host Laura Ingraham. "'If we leave ... you have to pay us for the money we put in.'" When Ingraham asked how Trump planned to collect money from Iraq, the president said: "Well, we have a lot of their money right now. We have a lot of their money. We have $35 billion of their money right now sitting in an account. And I think they'll agree to pay. I think they'll agree to pay. Earlier this week, Iraq's outgoing prime minister, Adel Abdul-Mahdi, called for American troops to leave the country to avoid further tensions with Iran. Mahdi's comments came the day after Iranian Quds Force Gen. Qassem Soleimani was killed in a U.S. drone strike at Baghdad's airport. A senior Iraqi commander of an Iran-backed militia was also killed. Trump had tweeted last week: "The United States has paid Iraq Billions of Dollars a year, for many years.

The operation to killed Qassem Soleimani went far beyond a drone strike and included U.S. Army Special Operation forces on the ground that followed the Iranian general's convoy; Leland Vittert reports. EXCLUSIVE: U.S. Special Operations forces on the ground in Iraq were following a convoy carrying Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani when it was struck by an American drone last week, killing Soleimani and nine others, Fox News has learned. The soldiers following Soleimani's convoy as it left Baghdad International Airport were about a half-mile behind when it was hit by a missile fired from a Reaper drone. They were on the scene within a minute or two and performed a so-called "bomb damage assessment," taking pictures of the scene and confirming that the drone had picked out the right car -- and that Soleimani was no more. The car that Qassem Soleimani was riding in at the time of his death.

WASHINGTON – Confronted by persistent questions about his military action in the Middle East, President Donald Trump and his top officials offered a string of fresh explanations Friday, with Trump now contending Iranian militants had planned major attacks on four U.S. embassies. Just hours earlier, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had said the U.S. didn't know when or where attacks might occur. Trump and other officials insisted anew that Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani had posed an imminent threat to the U.S., but they rebuffed repeated attempts to explain what they meant by "imminent." Trump, meanwhile, announced additional sanctions against Iran, which he had promised after a barrage of missiles fired by the Islamic State against American bases in Iraq earlier this week. Those Iranian missiles, which caused no casualties, were prompted by the U.S. drone strike that killed Gen. Qassem Soleimani last week in Baghdad.

Just about everyone agrees cybersecurity will be paramount in 2020, and governments and regulatory bodies are already taking action. While GDPR allows citizens in Europe to manage their digital footprint and data, the EU's Cybersecurity Act provides strong support for member nations to alert one another and act against bad actors. Still, cybersecurity is a difficult line of work. It's dynamic, and IT pros often feel harrowed by the amount of ground they're expected to cover. Instead of seeing what new cybersecurity trends will develop in 2020, we thought we'd ask the experts.

It has been more than two years in the making, but 13 new astronauts have finally joined NASA under the mission that will bring the first female to the moon -and some may be the first humans to step on Mars. The candidates, who have been training since 2017, participated in the first public graduation ceremony for astronauts on Friday at the American space Agency's Johnson Space Center in Houston. The group includes six women and seven men, two of them were Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronauts, and all were chosen from record-setting pool of more than 18,000 applicants. During the ceremony, each of the bright-eyed graduates were given a silver pin that symbolizes the Mercury 7 – NASA's first astronaut group that was selected in 1959. They will then be awarded a gold pin once they completed their first spaceflights.

Fox News Flash top headlines for Jan. 10 are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com A Mississippi Army veteran who served in both Vietnam and Iraq says his prosthetic legs were repossessed and returned in an unusable state -- because the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) refused to pay for them. Jerry Holliman, 69, told the Clarion-Ledger newspaper that prosthetics vender Hanger repossessed his artificial limbs two days before Christmas. Although he was encouraged to use Medicare to find replacement prosthetic legs, Holliman said he wanted the VA to pay for them.

Traditional cybersecurity tools such as mere anti-malware software or login audits aren't going to be sufficient in 2020--additional resources will be needed to protect organizations and their employees from cyberthreats. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are making productive inroads in the cybersecurity space. I spoke with Anish Joshi, vice president of technology at AI solutions provider Fusemachines, and Greg Martin, general manager of the Security Business Unit at Sumo Logic, a machine data analytics organization to get their input on the topic. The interviews have been lightly edited. Scott Matteson: What are the common pain points with cybersecurity?