I do the updates when I feel like it, roughly once every couple days. I don’t check anything at all to be honest, because I use CachyOS on my private computer and I honestly do not care so much about getting malware. I know, probably not the answer you expected, I just learned to live with the risk. Besides that, I try to install flatpacks or via npm. pacman is just used for the things where no other option exists. AUR is a huge mess and will always be full of malware, so don’t ever use Arch on any important devices. This is why on my servers I have Debian 13. CachyOS has own repositories, but as far as I know they just mirror AUR and add/modify some build flags