What are the potential security risks of allowing unrestricted access to PHP pages?

Allowing unrestricted access to PHP pages can lead to potential security risks such as unauthorized access to sensitive data, injection attacks, and execution of malicious scripts. To mitigate these risks, it is important to implement proper access controls, input validation, and output sanitization in your PHP code.

<?php
// Restrict access to PHP page by checking if user is logged in
session_start();
if(!isset($_SESSION['logged_in'])) {
    header("Location: login.php");
    exit();
}

// Validate input to prevent injection attacks
$user_input = $_GET['user_input'];
$clean_input = filter_var($user_input, FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);

// Sanitize output to prevent execution of malicious scripts
echo htmlspecialchars($clean_input);
?>