How necessary is using PHP filters?
- by Jamie
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!