What potential pitfalls should be considered when accessing highscores or external data with PHP scripts?

When accessing highscores or external data with PHP scripts, potential pitfalls to consider include security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and data validation errors. To mitigate these risks, it is crucial to sanitize user input, use prepared statements for database queries, and validate and filter incoming data to prevent malicious attacks. 

// Example of using prepared statements to prevent SQL injection
$stmt = $pdo->prepare('SELECT * FROM highscores WHERE player_name = :player_name');
$stmt->bindParam(':player_name', $_POST['player_name']);
$stmt->execute();

Keywords

SQL injection data validation cross-site scripting API rate limits error handling

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