Okay, that didn’t really happen to me, but it is a legitimate security concern for a web developer. Nobody wants to get a call asking why someone was able to purchase a t-shirt from their form and not only get the t-shirt but also receive a $100 credit.
This really comes down to secure development and making sure that any user input is properly sanitized to and validated to ensure that the values that were submitted aren’t malicious attempts at ruining your month. It is easy to see why one would need to sanitize user data coming from a text field on a form, but let’s explore what may be a less obvious situation and why one would want to sanitize data from a drop down select.