What are the potential security risks of storing passwords in plain text in PHP?

Storing passwords in plain text in PHP poses a significant security risk as anyone with access to the database can easily view and misuse the passwords. To mitigate this risk, passwords should be hashed before being stored in the database. Hashing is a one-way encryption method that converts the password into a fixed-length string of characters, making it extremely difficult to reverse engineer the original password.

$password = "plaintextpassword";
$hashed_password = password_hash($password, PASSWORD_DEFAULT);
// Store $hashed_password in the database