What potential security risks are present in the code provided?

The code provided is vulnerable to SQL injection attacks as it directly concatenates user input into the SQL query without sanitizing it. To mitigate this risk, we should use prepared statements with parameterized queries to prevent malicious SQL injection attempts. 

// Original vulnerable code
$username = $_POST['username'];
$password = $_POST['password'];

$query = "SELECT * FROM users WHERE username='$username' AND password='$password'";
$result = mysqli_query($connection, $query);

// Fixed code using prepared statements
$username = $_POST['username'];
$password = $_POST['password'];

$query = "SELECT * FROM users WHERE username=? AND password=?";
$stmt = mysqli_prepare($connection, $query);
mysqli_stmt_bind_param($stmt, "ss", $username, $password);
mysqli_stmt_execute($stmt);
$result = mysqli_stmt_get_result($stmt);

Keywords

SQL injection cross-site scripting insecure file uploads lack of input validation session hijacking

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