What are the potential risks of directly manipulating PHP files with form inputs?

Directly manipulating PHP files with form inputs can pose security risks such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and remote code execution. To mitigate these risks, it is important to sanitize and validate all user inputs before using them in PHP code. This can be done by using functions like htmlspecialchars() to prevent XSS attacks and prepared statements to prevent SQL injection. 

// Sanitize user input before using it in PHP code
$userInput = $_POST['user_input'];
$sanitizedInput = htmlspecialchars($userInput);

// Validate user input to prevent SQL injection
$stmt = $pdo->prepare("SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = :username");
$stmt->bindParam(':username', $sanitizedInput);
$stmt->execute();

Keywords

file manipulation security vulnerability code injection XSS attack data corruption

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