What are some security measures that PHP developers should implement to protect their applications from vulnerabilities?

One important security measure that PHP developers should implement is input validation to prevent SQL injection attacks. This can be done by using prepared statements with parameterized queries to sanitize user inputs before executing them in database queries.

// Input validation to prevent SQL injection
$pdo = new PDO('mysql:host=localhost;dbname=myDB', 'username', 'password');
$stmt = $pdo->prepare('SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = :username');
$stmt->bindParam(':username', $_POST['username']);
$stmt->execute();