What are the security implications of the current approach to sanitizing user input in the provided PHP code?

The current approach to sanitizing user input in the provided PHP code is vulnerable to SQL injection attacks. To mitigate this risk, it is recommended to use prepared statements with parameterized queries to sanitize user input before executing SQL queries. This approach helps prevent malicious SQL code from being injected into the query, enhancing the security of the application. 

// Fix for sanitizing user input using prepared statements
$stmt = $pdo->prepare("SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = :username");
$stmt->bindParam(':username', $username);
$stmt->execute();

Keywords

SQL injection cross-site scripting (XSS) input validation htmlspecialchars prepared statements

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