What potential security risks are involved in including external websites in PHP scripts?

Including external websites in PHP scripts can pose security risks such as cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks, data injection, and potential malware distribution. To mitigate these risks, it is important to validate and sanitize any data retrieved from external websites before using it in the PHP script. This can involve filtering out any potentially harmful code, encoding output to prevent XSS attacks, and ensuring that only trusted sources are being accessed. 

// Example of sanitizing data retrieved from an external website
$externalData = file_get_contents('https://www.example.com/data.json');
$cleanData = json_decode(strip_tags($externalData), true);

// Use $cleanData in your PHP script

Keywords

Cross-site scripting SQL injection remote code execution file inclusion data validation

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