What are the potential security risks or vulnerabilities to consider when processing form data in PHP, especially when interacting with a database?

When processing form data in PHP, especially when interacting with a database, it is important to consider security risks such as SQL injection attacks. To prevent SQL injection, you should always use prepared statements with parameterized queries to sanitize user input and avoid executing raw SQL queries with user input concatenated in them. 

// Example of using prepared statements to prevent SQL injection
$pdo = new PDO("mysql:host=localhost;dbname=mydatabase", "username", "password");

$stmt = $pdo->prepare("INSERT INTO users (username, password) VALUES (:username, :password)");
$stmt->bindParam(':username', $_POST['username']);
$stmt->bindParam(':password', $_POST['password']);
$stmt->execute();

Keywords

SQL injection cross-site scripting (XSS) data validation prepared statements encryption.

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