What are potential security risks when accessing input in an external URL using PHP?

When accessing input from an external URL using PHP, one potential security risk is the possibility of injection attacks, such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting. To mitigate these risks, it is important to validate and sanitize the input data before using it in your application. 

$url = 'https://www.externalurl.com/data'; 
$data = file_get_contents($url);

// Validate and sanitize the input data
$sanitized_data = filter_var($data, FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);

// Use the sanitized data in your application
echo $sanitized_data;

Keywords

SQL injection cross-site scripting remote code execution input validation URL encoding

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