What are the potential security risks of manipulating POST values at runtime in PHP?

Manipulating POST values at runtime in PHP can lead to security risks such as injection attacks, data corruption, and unauthorized access to sensitive information. To mitigate these risks, it is important to validate and sanitize all incoming POST data before using it in your application.

// Example of validating and sanitizing POST values
$username = isset($_POST['username']) ? htmlspecialchars($_POST['username']) : '';
$password = isset($_POST['password']) ? htmlspecialchars($_POST['password']) : '';

// Further validation and processing of the input data