What are the potential pitfalls of including PHP in a forum environment?

Potential pitfalls of including PHP in a forum environment include security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection attacks and cross-site scripting. To mitigate these risks, it is important to sanitize user input, validate data before processing, and use prepared statements when interacting with a database. 

// Sanitize user input
$clean_input = filter_var($_POST['input'], FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);

// Validate data before processing
if (strlen($clean_input) > 0) {
    // Process the data
}

// Use prepared statements when interacting with a database
$stmt = $pdo->prepare('SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = :username');
$stmt->bindParam(':username', $clean_input);
$stmt->execute();

Keywords

SQL injection Cross-site scripting (XSS) Session hijacking Code injection File inclusion vulnerability

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