What are the potential security risks of including content from an external website in PHP?

Including content from an external website in PHP can pose security risks such as Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks, where malicious scripts can be injected into the webpage and executed in the context of the user's browser. To prevent this, it is important to sanitize and validate any external content before displaying it on your webpage. 

<?php
// Fetch external content
$external_content = file_get_contents('https://www.externalwebsite.com/content');

// Sanitize and validate the content
$clean_content = htmlspecialchars($external_content);

// Display the sanitized content
echo $clean_content;
?>

Keywords

XSS CSRF SQL injection file inclusion remote code execution

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