What are the risks of using the deprecated mysql_ extension in PHP and how can they be mitigated?

Using the deprecated mysql_ extension in PHP poses security risks as it is no longer actively maintained and may contain vulnerabilities. To mitigate these risks, it is recommended to switch to the mysqli or PDO extension for interacting with MySQL databases in PHP.

// Connect to MySQL using mysqli extension
$mysqli = new mysqli("localhost", "username", "password", "database");

// Check connection
if ($mysqli->connect_error) {
    die("Connection failed: " . $mysqli->connect_error);
}