Preventing XSS

[tomharto]

Ive looked around the internet for ways to prevent XSS attacks and ive found a few things but im curious if theres any "best" method for it what people have used? The site im working on will have a lot of content put into a database by users.

[tangoforce]

XSS realistically has two main methods.

One is javascript injection into your pages which can do anything from redirect a user to downloading things to their computer.

The second is fooling another user on the web into clicking a link so that it is their IP recorded for an action and not the hackers. This is why many people don't like $_REQUEST because it can be abused - EG instead of being forced to click a form on the site it can be turned into a hyperlink and emailed to an unsuspecting user. This is why you must ALWAYS be sure of the data you are processing and check that its coming from where it should be and that its the correct type of data. $_REQUEST is safe to use if you use it properly (EG require someone to be logged in and take other measures such as IP address checking, cookie checking, password verification etc) but if you don't do all of that your system is open to abuse.