What are the potential security risks associated with the code snippet provided in the forum thread, and how can they be mitigated?

The code snippet provided in the forum thread is vulnerable to SQL injection attacks as it directly concatenates user input into the SQL query. To mitigate this risk, you should use prepared statements with parameterized queries to sanitize user input and prevent SQL injection. 

// Original vulnerable code
$user_input = $_POST['username'];
$query = "SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = '$user_input'";
$result = mysqli_query($conn, $query);

// Mitigated code using prepared statements
$user_input = $_POST['username'];
$query = "SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = ?";
$stmt = $conn->prepare($query);
$stmt->bind_param("s", $user_input);
$stmt->execute();
$result = $stmt->get_result();

Keywords

SQL injection cross-site scripting input validation prepared statements secure coding practices

Related Questions