What potential security risks are present in the code provided in the forum thread?

The code provided in the forum thread is vulnerable to SQL injection attacks due to directly concatenating user input into the SQL query. To mitigate this risk, the code should use prepared statements with parameterized queries to prevent malicious SQL injection attacks. 

// 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
$stmt = $connection->prepare("SELECT * FROM users WHERE username=? AND password=?");
$stmt->bind_param("ss", $username, $password);
$stmt->execute();
$result = $stmt->get_result();

Keywords

SQL injection cross-site scripting insecure file uploads session hijacking data validation

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