How to validate form inputs from bots in PHP?

Validate any form inputs by bot attacks in PHP by rectifying them correctly

Bots and their menace

BOTS humph!

Bots are an annoying piece of algorithms built with a sole intention of ruining our mornings and late night sleeps. These piece of little annoying fellows are what keeps any marketing automation sequence alive but yet useless.

Why though?

An attack from a bot onto a form submission on any website is a result of an injection program such as SQL injection and Python injection. These injection programs are made to steal data from a website and find for vulnerability codes to penetrate. This phase of finding for vulnerability is what makes the form submit over 1000 (thousands) of forms.

Problem and its Solution

There are multiple solutions for bot attacks if you dive into the Google or Bing search engine and yet you will still end up with another thousand bots in your database, email or CRM platforms. However in this article I am about to show you how you can rectify the bot attacks within PHP programming language on either dynamic or static websites.

Server-side validation

This is the most appropriate method of handling a bot attack rather than client-side validation since any injection programs are attacked via the URL of the website for example:

http://acunetix.php.example/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/demo_vul/endpoint.php?user=-1+union+select+1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10

UNION SELECT is used to combine results from multiple SELECT statements into a single result. The vulnerable column is the one whose data is being displayed on the page.

This example shows how SQL injection attack is being performed by simply writing a query into the URL of a website. To find which URL works the best is by creating a program to try various forms of submissions until the website is being penetrated.

The Actual Solution

In order to rectify these bots we need to perform a sanitization process.

If you have any questions regarding the process, comment below. Note that this method is functional on PHP v7.4 and above. There may be small changes needed to be made for other versions due to the complexity or deprecated libraries of PHP versions.