I'm working with an access point which I assume to be netgear, having looked up the mac address and finding it in netgear's range.
The essid is ATTxxx, which would be a default for an AT&T provided router. Although I know they used to use dLink routers, I've seen a couple of ATTxxx named access points with mac addresses in the netgear range, so I would guess they are now using netgear in at least some cases.
(It occurs to me that renaming the router to another ISP's default, and giving it the mac address of another router manufacturer, would be a good way to discourage penetration....)
I've tried oclhashcat+ using the rockyou and psychowar databases to no avail.
Now since I realize it's a netgear router, I'm attacking it using the adjective + noun + xxx default you've suggested.
(I know that this is a relatively new router, and that the previous router (probably a dLink) had a 10 digit numeric password: possibly the default for the dLink router. So with a default att access point name, and with the previous passphrase likely the router's default, it seems likely that the passphrase is the netgear default. On the other hand the passphrase could be wildly different: this is for a chinese restaurant owned by a vietnamese couple...!)
I found a lexical database at
http://wordnetcode.princeton.edu.. This provides large files of adjectives, nouns, etc., which can be manipulated with software tools, ulm, a good editor, etc. I've stripped out a list of adjectives and a list of nouns, cleaned out any special characters (which I assume are not found in the netgear keyspace), selected lengths from 2 to 10 characters (an arbitrary restriction, but seems reasonable), sorted and unduplicated the lists, and used combinator to generate a rather large list, which I then cut down to a 17character maximum string length,. This with the numerical digits added would give me strings of 7 to 20 characters (WPA max keylen). Then I used the hashcat gui to run a hybrid dictionary + mask attack, and got a estimated run time of about 30 days for my single HD7970. Then I came across the recommendation to use splitlen to cut the input dictionary into same length wordlists. oclhashcat+ starts with the shorter length wordlists and works up. This seems good, since I would think the netgear passphrases would normally be less than the maximum length. I note that splitlen unless recompiled defaults to a maximum length of 15 characters, which plus xxx numeric give me a max length of 18. So if I don't get a hit, I may use "len" to split out the 16 and 17 character strings and run those separately.
I'm about 4 days in, and oclhashcat+ is working on the "11" length file. I'm hoping to hit paydirt in the next few days....
Others working against netgear routers may wish to look at the princeton site for good lists of adjectives and nouns. If desired, I'd be happy to contribute my adjective and noun lists, which are quite reasonable in size, or any of the further processed files - which become rather large.