Are there potential security risks associated with storing passwords in plain text in a database?

Storing passwords in plain text in a database poses a significant security risk as anyone with access to the database can easily view and misuse the passwords. To mitigate this risk, passwords should be securely hashed before storing them in the database. Hashing is a one-way cryptographic function that converts the password into a fixed-length string of characters, making it impossible to reverse engineer the original password.

$password = "password123";
$hashed_password = password_hash($password, PASSWORD_DEFAULT);

// Store $hashed_password in the database