What are the potential security risks when using PHP to handle form submissions?

One potential security risk when using PHP to handle form submissions is the vulnerability to SQL injection attacks if user input is not properly sanitized. To mitigate this risk, it is important to use prepared statements or parameterized queries when interacting with a database to prevent malicious SQL queries from being executed.

// Example of using prepared statements to prevent SQL injection

// Assuming $conn is the database connection object

$stmt = $conn->prepare("INSERT INTO users (username, password) VALUES (?, ?)");
$stmt->bind_param("ss", $username, $password);

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

$stmt->execute();
$stmt->close();