What potential security risks are associated with the SQL query shown in the forum thread?

The SQL query shown in the forum thread is vulnerable to SQL injection attacks, where malicious users can manipulate the input to execute unauthorized SQL commands. To prevent this, you should use prepared statements with parameterized queries to sanitize user input and prevent SQL injection attacks. 

```php
// Fix using prepared statements
$stmt = $pdo->prepare("SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = :username");
$stmt->bindParam(':username', $username);
$stmt->execute();
```
In this code snippet, we are using prepared statements with parameters to bind the user input safely to the query, preventing SQL injection attacks.

Keywords

SQL injection prepared statements PDO mysqli_real_escape_string data validation

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