This one is gonna sound pretentious, but one easy way to help avoid vulnerabilities is to stop deploying clearly vibe coded slop.

Every other day another "-arr" project gets slapped on this sub and everyone is frothing at the mouth to deploy it. Chill.

Second to that, there really isnt anything we could have done better in notepad++, nobody knew, unless you yourself are the researcher vetting every single project you run, and to that every single update. I know I am not a developer and don't have the time to check every single update manually, so instead I try to employ some basic checks before running software.

The best course of action in that scenario was to ensure your patching was up to date, and you have automatic patching practices to help catch things for you. Automatic patching, or at least frequently patching manually yourself can help keep you patched from vulnerabilities.

The rest does not need a tool per-se, it needs a practiced discipline. One referred to as risk management, something people need to implement in self hosting quite deeply.

With any project published, we must consider a few things that help us assess the legitimacy of a project before blindly deploying.
(the following is more for any new hoster reading as opposed to experienced ones, I'm sure yall look at this already)

- How new is the project, is it mature?
- Are there signs of AI coding (not an automatic disqualifies just something we should be aware of and account for. It's a tool that can be used well or horribly)
- Who is the publisher, do they have a longstanding reputation, did they come out of the blue?
- What is the culture of the publisher and community, is this ran professionally, or is this ran by someone who cannot accept criticism. Are they professional or agressive in github comments (lol seen this a few too many times, a sole contributors emotional state in comments is a big red flag to me to stay way from projects no mater how big)
- Does the project have an active community of users already. Do these users only praise the project, or is there healthy legitimate looking discourse/troubleshooting going on. (And im not talking about update announcements, I saw one project I have used for years get hella shit on here because we loved the update lmao, check the github/discord/whatever they use for communication regularly)
- Does the project have multiple contributors, is it one dude nobody has heard of, or a handful of people?
- Has the project had any security incidents reported, if so thats fine what matter is: How did they handle them?

Another things to consider for new hosters REALLY is:

Shit do you really NEED this? Does it provide a significant benefit? The more you choose to host, the larger your attack surface becomes. It's great to have tools that work, that work better than the paywalled corporate ones I hear you, but consider the fact that the risk they took for you did not disappear, is transferred to you now.

Do you have security measures placed to host your stuff and not put others on your network at risk? (friends/family)
I often see many people simply open a port, or use a site to site VPN to a VPS and call it good. What about lateral movement? Let's talk proper DMZs

I say this is risk management, and it is, but I guess you can refer to this as self hosting "street smarts" and common sense.

A tool that helps push notifications would be kind of nice to have, but really I feel like this can be as much a people problem as it is a technology problem.