What are some potential pitfalls in the PHP code provided in the forum thread?

The PHP code provided in the forum thread is vulnerable to SQL injection attacks due to the use of concatenation in the SQL query. To prevent this, parameterized queries should be used instead. Additionally, the code does not handle potential errors that may occur during the database query execution, which can lead to unexpected behavior. 

// Original vulnerable code
$username = $_POST['username'];
$password = $_POST['password'];

$query = "SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = '$username' AND password = '$password'";
$result = mysqli_query($conn, $query);

// Fixed code using parameterized queries
$username = $_POST['username'];
$password = $_POST['password'];

$query = "SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = ? AND password = ?";
$stmt = mysqli_prepare($conn, $query);
mysqli_stmt_bind_param($stmt, "ss", $username, $password);
mysqli_stmt_execute($stmt);
$result = mysqli_stmt_get_result($stmt);

Keywords

SQL injection XSS vulnerability file inclusion vulnerability unescaped user input insecure file permissions

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