What are the potential security risks associated with passing unchecked values to PHP variables?

Passing unchecked values to PHP variables can lead to security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and remote code execution. To mitigate these risks, always sanitize and validate user input before assigning it to variables.

// Sanitize and validate user input before assigning it to variables
$input = $_POST['user_input'];
$clean_input = filter_var($input, FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);