What potential security risks are present in the code snippet provided, especially in relation to user input handling?

The code snippet provided is vulnerable to SQL injection attacks due to directly inserting user input into the SQL query without proper sanitization or parameterization. To mitigate this risk, user input should be sanitized and properly escaped before being used in SQL queries. This can be achieved by using prepared statements with parameterized queries. 

// Fix for handling user input securely using prepared statements

// Assuming $conn is the database connection object

// Sanitize user input
$username = filter_var($_POST['username'], FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);

// Prepare the SQL query using a prepared statement
$stmt = $conn->prepare("SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = ?");
$stmt->bind_param("s", $username);

// Execute the query
$stmt->execute();

// Get the result
$result = $stmt->get_result();

// Process the result as needed

Keywords

SQL injection cross-site scripting (XSS) input validation prepared statements htmlspecialchars

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