What are the potential security risks of blindly accepting data from POST or GET requests in PHP?

Blindly accepting data from POST or GET requests in PHP can lead to security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and data manipulation attacks. To mitigate these risks, it is crucial to properly sanitize and validate user input before using it in your application. 

// Sanitize and validate user input from POST request
$username = isset($_POST['username']) ? filter_var($_POST['username'], FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING) : '';
$email = isset($_POST['email']) ? filter_var($_POST['email'], FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL) : '';

// Use prepared statements to prevent SQL injection
$stmt = $pdo->prepare("INSERT INTO users (username, email) VALUES (:username, :email)");
$stmt->bindParam(':username', $username);
$stmt->bindParam(':email', $email);
$stmt->execute();

Keywords

SQL injection cross-site scripting data validation input sanitization PHP superglobals

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