What potential risks can arise from not properly sanitizing user input in PHP when writing to log files?

Improperly sanitizing user input in PHP when writing to log files can lead to security vulnerabilities such as injection attacks. To mitigate this risk, it is essential to sanitize user input by using functions like htmlspecialchars() or addslashes() to prevent malicious code from being executed. 

// Sanitize user input before writing to log file
$userInput = $_POST['input'];
$sanitizedInput = htmlspecialchars($userInput);

$logFile = 'logs.txt';
$logMessage = date('Y-m-d H:i:s') . ' - ' . $sanitizedInput . PHP_EOL;

file_put_contents($logFile, $logMessage, FILE_APPEND);

Keywords

SQL injection Cross-site scripting (XSS) File inclusion Remote code execution Data leakage

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