How necessary is using PHP filters?

Posted by Jamie on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Jamie
Published on 2010-12-31T02:44:41Z Indexed on 2010/12/31 2:54 UTC
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php

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security

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joomla

I'm a relatively newbie to PHP and just making my way through the W3Schools tut.

The tut makes a big point of saying you must always filter external data (i.e. cookies, form data etc).

I'm writing a fairly simple system that talks with a third party Joomla extension. It's at a prototype stage where I'm just wanting to demonstrate the functionality in a minimum viable product.

Basically, I'd like to know... what's the worst that could happen in I don't filter content. Are we talking 'I might get a bunch of spam', or 'a good hacker could get root server access'?

Have hunted around online, but would love any of your experience / insight on the matter!

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