Small businesses are the second most vulnerable target of online threats for 2011, internet security provider AVG predicts.

According Lloyd Borrett, AVG security evangelist, said the threat to small businesses is due to the increasing number that fail to protect themselves properly.

“While a growing number of cyber criminals are specifically targeting small businesses, 85 percent of small businesses refuse to see the danger at all,” he said.

“This does not bode well for the Internet community at large as small business owners often do not have proper security policies and enforcement measures that can educate workers how to be safe online and not act in a way that the puts the company network at risk.”

Also named on the list of the top five greatest threats for 2011 were mobile devices (#1), social search (#3), applications (#4) and the cloud (#5).